Author Archives: Matt Forney

Welcome to the Divide… is a first for me: a book that is completely unreviewable.

I can’t say it’s a good book, but I can’t say it’s bad, either. .S.P. Daley’s (that’s not a typo: his pen name has that extra period) debut novel is a dense digression on individuality, collectivism and dystopia, written in squid-ink prose and stretching on for nearly 400 pages. Daley sent me a copy on Aaron Clarey’s advice; Clarey loved it, but going to a guy like him for reading recommendations is like asking a teetotaler about craft brews.

Welcome to the Divide… is the most impenetrable novel I’ve ever read. The closest comparison I can make is to Beyond the Bush, the schizophrenic political satire-cum-80’s-movie-rehash squeezed out by Ann Sterzinger’s label Hopeless Books, but that novel had waaaaaay better pacing. I can’t review Daley’s book because I honestly don’t understand it. I can’t grok the style, I can’t grasp the ideas, and I’m not going to pan a book that was clearly written for people more intelligent than myself.

The only advice I can give is to read the book for yourself.

Welcome to the Divide…’s premise, as much as I can tell, concerns a “drone” on the cusp of self-awareness. The initial books concern some kind of control facility staffed by fellow drones lacking any concept of self-identity. The thrust of Divide’s plot concerns S., the protagonist, evolving from a mere drone into a sapient being independent of the hive mind:

After being continually accosted by Our Sssupervisssor’s failed attempts to punish them, the other drones became increasingly and openly disdainful towards Our Sssupervisssor… Soon they learned that slurred mocking of Our Sssupervisssor was permissible, provided it wasn’t done in the presence of non-security-drones… These acts of retaliation became more and more prevalent…

Daley’s prose style is reminiscent of Thomas Pynchon, less pretentious but just as impenetrable. All the book’s sentences end in Célinean ellipses, and he also has an annoying habit of using “etc” repeatedly. While these sound like idiotic gimmicks, Daley’s tight planning shows that these are deliberate stylistic choices.

Unfortunately, they also make the book difficult to comprehend.

I read Welcome to the Divide… all the way through and even re-read several sections in an attempt to understand what was going on, but the book had me lost. It’s not that Daley is deliberately trying to be obtuse as so many postmodern writers are, but his writing style and the way he presents his ideas left me scratching my head. The book constantly drowns you in an ocean of philosophical digressions and asides, giving you no time to come up for air:

As discussions over the particulars were being conducted, the Commanding-figure suddenly broke in, halting the others’ speech… The Commanding-figure’s voice ordered one of the other figures to proceed to the barrels, and count the number of them remaining… I remained frozen in my place, as a figure dashed over to these barrels to quantify how many were present… When the tarp was ripped away from the barrels, it seemed that I would soon be counted out as well… By the night’s darkness or some miraculous blunder, they remained oblivious of my presence…

I don’t want to pan Welcome to the Divide…, mainly because I think the problem isn’t so much the book itself as it is my interpretation of it. I’m sure that if I went back and re-read the book with a critical eye, I’d come away with a stronger sense of what Daley was trying to accomplish. As it stands, it’s the kind of book that doesn’t appeal to me and that I don’t really want to spend more time trying to figure out.

Despite this, I’m going to recommend you buy Welcome to the Divide… anyway, if only so you can come to your own conclusions. It’s clear that Daley put a lot of work into the book, and his style will definitely appeal to a particular subset of readers. Just because I’m not part of that subset doesn’t mean I’m going to criticize the novel for it. Welcome to the Divide... defies reviewing, so just check the book out for yourself.

Click here to buy Welcome to the Divide…

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Go Forth is the kind of book that makes me want to put my head through a wall.

I don’t mean that as an insult. Goldmund’s literary debut, a tale of debauchery and self-discovery, is an enthralling read. Go Forth is like being tossed into a roller coaster ass-first and clinging to the safety bar for dear life as you shoot through the loop-de-loops. Goldmund isn’t just a legit player, he’s a genuine literary talent, and reading this memoir makes me excited for whatever he puts out next.

But Jesus, this book is such a missed opportunity.

Go Forth is a fun book, but it displays the mistakes of a first-time author. While I enjoyed Goldmund’s tales of debauchery and sin south of the border, his poor pacing and other amateur errors suck the life out of his story. While this shouldn’t deter anyone from buying his book, don’t expect a masterpiece.

Go Forth, as I mentioned earlier, is a memoir focusing on a trip Goldmund took to Mexico earlier this year. There’s not much in the way of organized plot: he simply recites his adventures as they come, journeying from New Orleans down to May-he-co and back again. Along the way, he does drugs, bangs girls and lives life like he’s going to the electric chair in six months:

After sleeping for an hour, I woke up to the Indian rubbing my cock. I flipped her over, slipped in raw, and we fucked hard and loud for an hour. Her legs were so flexible that I could push her knee into her mouth—that opened up her pussy deep and wide. My entire cock sunk into this girl as we half asleep, half drunkenly banged into oblivion.

Goldmund writes like a modern-day Kerouac, with a dash of Jim Carroll and Bradley Smith. His prose slides off the page like sheets of jizz off a porn star’s face, throwing names, places and notches at you in light-speed. Unlike Kerouac, Goldmund understands the value of paragraph breaks, so you won’t be throwing your Kindle out the window in frustration at multi-page blocks of text.

Some people might have difficulty believing Goldmund’s stories, but having seen him in action myself, I know he’s the real deal. Watching the guy work a bar is like seeing a time-lapse video of maggots feasting on a dead cow. The last time I hung out with him, Kid Strangelove and I watched him zero in on the only cute, single girl in the bar on a dead Monday night… and take her home.

The problem with Goldmund’s writing is that it’s a mile wide and an inch deep.

Go Forth takes you all over the map, plowing through Goldmund’s conquests and escapades, but it doesn’t go into depth in any particular place. He glosses over just about everything in the book, giving you a taste of what he’s done, but no more. While this gives the book a fast pace and keeps it from getting dull—I finished it in about a couple hours—it strips the book of poignancy and emotional impact:

Her hot, dressed-up friend insisted on coming back with us and was visibly upset. She was clicking her heels hard on the pavement and when I tried to tease her a little, she ignored me. We walked to a big apartment complex that outlined a large courtyard. My girl took me into a room and we got naked quickly. She asked if I had a condom and I took one out of my back pocket, slipped it on, and we banged.

I don’t expect a detailed description of every instance that Goldmund has stuck his dick in some broad, but all too often during Go Forth, I was wishing he’d flesh out certain girls or stories a bit more. The effect is like being dragged through a museum at top speed by a tour guide who clearly just wants to kick you out in time for his lunch break. The book would have benefited from another fifty pages of detail.

Additionally, there’s one obnoxious digression near the end of Go Forth that brings the momentum to a halt. About four-fifths of the way in, Goldmund gives his thoughts on being banned from a certain forum (unnamed in the book, but you can figure out who he’s talking about). Not only does it clash with the show-don’t-tell motif of the book, Goldmund comes off as a little gossipy and femme.

I can understand why he’d want to write about it, but it would have been best left as a blog post.

Aside from these issues and the occasional wonky phrasing (more a product of lax editing than anything), Go Forth is a stimulating tale of excess and adventure. Take it for what it is—the first book by a talented-but-undisciplined writer—and you’ll enjoy it.

Click here to buy Go Forth: A Journey South.

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A direct sequel to The Saint Closes the Case, The Avenging Saint focuses on Simon Templar’s efforts to get revenge for the death of one of his lieutenants in that book. Unlike the sci-fi stylings of The Saint Closes the Case, The Avenging Saint feels more like a James Bond novel, with the Saint and company rushing to stop a new world war from igniting due to the machinations of arms dealer Rayt Marius:

“Now see here. Roger, you’ll come with me, and help me locate and start up the kite. Sonia, I want you to scrounge round and find a couple of helmets and a couple of pairs of goggles. Angel Face’s outfit is bound to be around the house somewhere, and he’s probably got some spares. After that, find me another nice long coil of rope—I’ll bet they’ve got plenty—and your job’s done. Lessing”—he looked across at the millionaire, who had risen to his feet at last—“it’s about time you did something for your life. You find some stray bits of string, without cutting into the beautiful piece that Sonia’s going to find for me, and amuse yourself splicing large and solid chairs onto Freeman, Hardy, and Willis over in the corner. Then they’ll be properly settled to wait here till I come back for them. Is that all clear?”

The Avenging Saint features just about everything you’d want from a Leslie Charteris novel: sharp dialogue, violent action and daring escapes. It’s not as poignant as The Saint Closes the Case, but it does its job well enough, further developing the characters and providing a fun story. It’s not thought-provoking literature, but that hardly makes it bad.

Put simply, if you enjoy thrillers and/or have read Charteris’ other novels, you’ll enjoy The Avenging Saint.

Click here to buy The Avenging Saint.

Read Next: Enter the Saint by Leslie Charteris

Reading this book was like watching a man perform open heart surgery on himself.

The Sovereign Man is the writing debut of James Maverick, who’s been entertaining and informing men for years at his blog Maverick Traveler. While Maverick occupies the same get-laid-get-paid genre of travel writing as Roosh and Mark Zolo, his writing has always had a more mature edge to it, a calmness befitting his wider horizons. The Sovereign Man is a perfect crystallization of his beliefs and attitude, a must-read for men.

It’s not a self-help book per se: while the book is about Maverick’s philosophy of masculinity, it’s not a go-here-and-do-this kind of title. Rather, it’s a carefully constructed vivisection of Maverick’s own life, distilled into a series of principles laid out like Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. The Sovereign Man is an excellent summation of “big picture” masculinity and worth adding to your collection.

The book opens with an introduction detailing Maverick’s own masculine journey. After being flaked on by a Ukrainian girl he met on a train, he began deconstructing everything about his life in an attempt to understand himself:

But when there’s interest and desire, everything changes. I once met a nice girl during a trip to San Diego. After returning to New York, there was rarely a period of two days where she didn’t contact me and ask when I was coming back. Then there was a girl I met in Mexico, who was anxiously waiting for me at the airport when I returned for the second time six months later. These girls behaved very differently from the flaky Ukrainian girl. They were always available to hang out at a moment’s notice. All I had to do was ask. In fact, one day, while I was sitting in my New York apartment, I remember joking with the Mexican girl over Skype that we should get drunk in her favorite bar in Mexico City that night. She smiled and replied, “I’ll see you there.” That’s how easy it was. I didn’t have to beg, plead or cajole the California girl to see me. I didn’t have to ask the Mexican girl to meet me at the airport. Both of them wanted to see me, so they made it happen. They spoke with their actions instead of muttering flimsy promises and excuses. There were no games whatsoever. All I had to do was state a time and place and they would eagerly show up.

The Sovereign Man is divided into ten chapters, each focused on a principle or attitude that embodies Maverick’s concept of the “sovereign man.” The initial chapters focus on more obvious concepts such as value and time, but the later ones, such as “Kingdom,” are more esoteric and require you to have attained some mastery of the earlier sections. Maverick bolsters his arguments primarily with examples from his own life, both revolving around him and people he’s met:

Standards are also shaped by your environment, because it describes what you continuously interact with, day in and day out. Environment is your reference point. In America, thanks to the powerful reach of Hollywood and other mass media, a regular girl who happens to have blonde hair and a nice body is elevated to be highly important. These girls are artificially made to seem special and unique. But in countries where such women are as common as a blue sky, they’re nothing more than just normal. They aren’t in such huge demand. I’ve spent several years in various Northern and Eastern European countries, where the majority of women perfectly fit the “blonde bombshell” stereotype. I’ve ridden buses with them and passed them in the streets every single day. In fact, as I am writing this, a very cute blonde girl justpassed by on the street. Don’t get me wrong, such women are still very attractive; a beautiful woman is still a beautiful woman no matter where she is. But beautiful is all she is. She no longer has this mythical and spellbinding God-like status. When I spend every single day surrounded by seemingly beautiful women, the typical “blonde bombshell” label loses its luster. If you’re in a desert with no water in sight, water becomes scarce and dear. But if you’re in a freshwater lake, water is no longer scarce: it’s abundant. Similarly, if the only time you see an attractive woman is in a Hollywood movie and not regularly out on the streets, then beauty becomes truly scarce and highly sought after.

Maverick’s writing carefully skirts the edge between relatability and erudition. Think the wide-angle perspective of Robert Greene combined with the practicality of Jack Donovan in The Way of Men and you have The Sovereign Man in a nutshell. While the book is light on actionable advice, its broad-stroke philosophy will aid any man looking for enlightenment.

Reading The Sovereign Man is like attending a college lecture by an adjunct professor who isn’t afraid to crack jokes or call bullshit when he sees it.

The book is also worth reading because of Maverick’s willingness to examine his own life. As the bulk of The Sovereign Man’s examples are drawn from his personal experiences, he critically dissects his own screwups and mistakes, explaining where he went wrong when it came to implementing his own advice. Few writers are capable of the kind of self-examination that he pulls off.

The only area I can really fault the book is in Maverick’s prose. While his writing is clean, functional and understandable, Maverick is not a native English speaker and it shows. This isn’t an issue in his blog posts, but when you’re reading an entire book in his overly formal style, it can drag at points. It’s a shame too, considering the breadth of information he covers from start to finish.

Ultimately though, The Sovereign Man is an excellent distillation of masculine philosophy, worth reading on its own or as part of a self-improvement kick. If you’re looking for direction in life or you’re just interested in Maverick’s thoughts, this book is worth your money.

Click here to buy The Sovereign Man.

Read Next: The Smell of Pines: A Long Walk with Death by James Druman

Chess is a funny game: easy to learn but hard to master. The main area where novice chess players get wrong is failing to think in advance. Unlike most games, which emphasize short-term gains, chess forces you to plan things out, to forego instant gratification in favor of long-term victory. An amateur will play chess trying to capture every enemy piece he can, leaving his king open to checkmate and never developing anything close to a winning strategy.

The good news is that learning to win at chess is much easier than you think.

Winning Chess Tactics for Juniors is my favorite resource for learning chess, a handy book that simplifies the game in a manner that anyone can understand. The principle behind Winning Chess Tactics is that pattern recognition is the key to learning the game; if you can recognize certain patterns in chess, you can come out on top pretty easily. To this end, the book provides you a series of problems, challenging you to solve them through repetition and practice:

The discovery is one of the most powerful types of move possible in a game of chess. The term “discovery” simply means that a piece is moved from a rank, file, or diagonal while uncovering an attack by friendly forces behind it on the line, thereby giving both pieces a chance to simultaneously threaten the opponent. Discoveries come in three varieties. The most powerful is the DOUBLE CHECK, in which the moving piece gives check and uncovers a check on the enemy King by another piece. It is easy to analyze the response to double check: The attacked King must move. Interposition or capture of a checking piece are not possible. DISCOVERED CHECK means that the enemy King is attacked only by the piece unleashed along the line (file, rank, or diagonal), while the moving or discovering piece is free to make threats of its own. DISCOVERED ATTACK occurs in the same manner as the others, except that the enemy King is not directly involved. Discovered attacks of any kind are extremely dangerous and even the threat of a discovered check or double check often brings a chess game to a sudden end. Watch for all three types of discovery in this chapter.

Winning Chess Tactics for Juniors features over 500 problems for you to solve, covering everything from pins to forks and back again. While the book’s insistence that you not use a chessboard to work on the problems is annoying, it definitely helps with your visualization. Within a month of buying the book and doing 20 some-odd problems a day, my game improved immensely.

Bottom line: if you’re looking to get better at chess, Winning Chess Tactics for Juniors is a must-buy.

Click here to buy Winning Chess Tactics for Juniors.

Read Next: The War of Art: Winning the Inner Creative Battle by Steven Pressfield

Living the life of an international playboy is what many in the ‘sphere aspire to, but what comes after? Let’s get real: few of us are going to be swooping fly twentysomething girls when we’re in our fifties, or even forties. While some guys seem to think they can simply transition to being a husband and father after a life of snorting coke and banging sluts, evidence suggests that coming down from the high of hedonism is a lot harder than it looks.

English Teacher X is living proof of this.

Requiem for a Vagabond, the final book in his “Burnout Trilogy” (following To Travel Hopelessly and Vodkaberg: Nine Years in Russia), is a hilarious and depressing portrait of middle-aged dissolution. After spending the nineties hopping from Bangkok to Prague and the oughts living it up in Russia, ETX finds himself thrust into a life of responsibility. While he finds himself enjoying the lack of action in his life, his is a reality that few if any men would want to have.

If you’re looking for a poignant and comic depiction of middle age, Requiem for a Vagabond is a must-read.

The book picks up where Vodkaberg left off: after nine years of sex, drugs and techno in Russia, ETX flees for the desolate wastes of the Middle East, the metrics of conventional success finally swinging in his favor. He has a well-paying teaching job in “the Kingdom” (it’s fairly obvious which country he’s talking about, but out of his respect for his anonymity, I’m not going to name it), where booze is illegal and women are barred from leaving the house without a niqab. After plowing through countless psycho sluts, he has a cute Russian girlfriend who is responsible and faithful. Despite the sensory deprivation of his surroundings, ETX is downright elated:

He was a local Arab guy in his early 20s, a bit pudgy but all in all unremarkable-looking. First he came up and sat down next to me and said he just wanted to practice his English; it turned out the phrase he wanted to practice was, “You have a beautiful body.”

I stood up and walked away, and rode my bike to the Subway to have a sandwich.

He was gone when I came back.

The next week, he appeared again, and apologized for his comment, and then put his hand on my arm . I told him not to touch me, and got up and rode away on my bike.

English Teacher X stumbles through a series of familiar-sounding escapades while employed in the Kingdom: dealing with moronic bosses, chumming it up with degenerate colleagues, and sneaking off to Dubai for what little debauchery his body can handle. He breaks bread with the usual cast of layabouts, both new (such as Heinrich, a half-German, half-Canadian old guy on the hunt for a foreign wife) and old (such as Crazy Bob from Vodkaberg). Requiem also has ETX sojourning back to his hometown in the “Dirty South” (again, fairly obvious what city he’s referring to) to commiserate with his folks and take survivalist preparation courses:

“You came in our room and were going to poop on the chair. Dad asked you if you were sleepwalking and you said yes, and he took you into the hallway. You went into another room and were going to poop on the chair again.”

“Oh… my… god…”

“They led you into the bathroom and you pooped but you didn’t flush.”

“Oh man…”

While just as dark as ever, Requiem shows ETX continuing to evolve as a writer, his prose bubbling with a calm resignation. In contrast to the jittery nervousness of To Travel Hopelessly and the nauseating crawl of Vodkaberg, ETX displays a sort of sagacity, the wisdom of a professional burnout. He’s approaching old age, he’s unmarried, he’s spent most of his life living paycheck to paycheck, he’s wrecked his body to the point of near-collapse… he just isn’t cool anymore, if he ever was.

And he doesn’t care.

Why is getting drunk and chasing bipolar slags the pinnacle of life? Why is waking up with a hangover and a pile of used condoms on the floor the ideal existence? English Teacher X spent the bulk of his adult life doing precisely that and he’s sick of it. To someone who’s blacked out more often than Manila during a typhoon, a quiet life of working, reading books and having sexy Skype chats with Russian fuckbuddies is a paradise all its own.

Nothing represents this grasping for a normal life better than ETX’s relationship with the Girlfriend. She’s loving, devoted and sane… and indecisive. He tries to get her a visa so she can come to the U.S., but she’s rejected. He offers to move with her abroad, she says no, preferring the safety of her accounting job back home. Requiem gives the impression that both of them would like to settle down—kids, a white picket fence, stable jobs in a first-world country—but deep down, both of them know that it’s not going to happen.

But hey, what they’ve got is pretty good too.

This is why Requiem for a Vagabond is worth reading: it’s a hysterically honest look at what happens when the DJ packs up and the partygoers go home. It’s not a cautionary tale—ETX is smart enough to not ruin a good story with moralizing—but it opens a window on what middle age is like for someone who spent the rest of his life knee-deep in pussy and vodka. From a critical standpoint, it’s also nice to see a writer explore new territory, and it makes me wonder what English Teacher X will be doing next.

Click here to buy Requiem for a Vagabond.

Read Next: To Travel Hopelessly: A TEFL Memoir by English Teacher X