Author Archives: Matt Forney

If someone were to write a book The 100 People You Must Meet Before You Die, Trevor Blake would be on the list.

A fixture in underground and alternative publishing for over two decades, Blake’s zine-cum-blog OVO is a repository of heretical thought and just plain weirdness. I had the privilege of meeting him when I lived in Portland; actually describing the experience of hanging out with Trevor is difficult. He’s not a particularly imposing man. His voice is on the soft side. But when he speaks, his thoughts are so concrete and well-articulated that I can’t help but hang on every word.

I’m half-convinced he isn’t even human, but has been sent to examine the creepy, bizarre inhabitants of planet Earth before reporting back to his masters in Dimension X.

Confessions of a Failed Egoist and Other Essays is a difficult book, not because it’s hard to understand, but because it gives no leeway to anyone. With surgical wit and wisdom, Trevor deconstructs every pretty lie of modern America, even the pretty lies that he himself is susceptible to. Organized religion and atheism, feminism and patriarchy, anarchism and statism; nothing is off-limits. Like a modern-day Socrates, Trevor Blake chucks dynamite at sacred icons just because, because one spoonful of truth is worth a bucketful of lies.

If you enjoy scorching prose and left-field opinions, Confessions of a Failed Egoist is a necessary addition to your collection.

What sets Trevor apart from his intellectual forbears (H.L. Mencken, Robert Anton Wilson and other anti-collectivist writers) is his willingness to critically examine his own beliefs. The eponymous essay kicks off the book, a logical defenestration of the worldview closest to Trevor’s heart:

Egoism builds a shanty, not a shelter, on the plateau of heresy. Egoism stakes a claim and keeps moving. Most people muddle through the day. A minority seek to rule the muddle. A smaller minority still seek to reform the rulers, and a smaller number seek revolution, and a very small number repudiate the revolution, the reform and the rulers alike. Egoism is in that smallest minority, the imp of the perverse and the bur under the saddle, nobody’s friend and its own worst enemy. Egoism isn’t the boy who laughs and points at the naked emperor, it’s the boy who laughs and points at a naked empire.

This excerpt also captures the delightful prosody of Trevor’s writing. His prose has a whimsical, poetic feel to it, winding through alliteration and developing a meter all its own. It’s worth noting that his writing isn’t as strong in some of the book’s older essays (some of the works in Confessions have been recycled from previous issues of OVO), but the book remains an enjoyable read throughout thanks to Trevor’s dry humor and laconic approach.

Another example: “The first Objectivist I met was in college. Now he’s doing hard time for statutory rape.”

Confessions of a Failed Egoist is organized in what some might think is a haphazard style. While the initial essays have a sensible layout—Trevor includes a review of The Myth of Natural Rights and Other Essays, that long-despised demolisher of libertarian golden calves, as well as the free speech missive “My Crowded Fist Theater Shouting Fire at the End of Your Nose”—some of the essays seem wildly out of place. For example, “Co-Remoting with the Thunderous,” an entertaining profile of Baltimore artist tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE, doesn’t seem like it fits. “Infinite Material Universe,” another essay, reads like something out of The Law of One:

The universe is the sum of all the partially overlapping and contradictory regions of space and time. What is impossible in one time and place is common in another time and place. Infinite possibilities includes those possibilities where what is possible in one region and impossible in another will overlap. The marvelous will meet the mundane. Gradually. Suddenly. Just once. Today, tomorrow.

The second half of Confessions is where Trevor truly hits his stride. “Really,” one of my favorite selections, takes a sledgehammer to the pseudo-Freudian psychoanalysis that passes for debate today (ex: “If you’re acting like a man you must be a misogynist.”). “Why Should I Speak of Them?” discusses one of Trevor’s past jobs as a used book dealer and the bizarre characters who frequented his shop, from a homeless Nazi to a guy who walked around with an “influencing machine” in his pocket. The crown achievement of the book is “Triumph of the Wilt,” a blistering attack on everyone from socialists to feminists to the idiots on both left and right (though as Trevor points out, one of the crucial differences between the two is that “the left can make a joke, but the right can take one”):

You must never think of a woman as a baby machine, and you must never forget that a woman is a baby machine. Women need public funding to go to college but if they drop out to be mommies, that’s okay too. Women are the same on the job as any man but if they need time off to be mommies, that’s okay too. Put it all together: women need access to all academic fields to gain the specialized knowledge needed for specialized careers involving heavy investment from employers, but if they want to have it all to be mommies, that’s okay too.

What’s the endgame of all this idol destruction? Does there have to be one? The truth is an animal all its own, one that serves no man or ideology, though some of both come close. Everything that mankind touches is tainted, and a nice takedown of the freaks is necessary to keep the social digestive tract working.

That’s what Confessions of a Failed Egoist is: an enema for the mind, with a side of Vicodin to keep the pussies from screaming.

It’s only after you’ve finished Confessions that the seemingly off-topic essays such as “Co-Remoting with the Thunderous” and “So You Want to Meet an Alien?” (about The Skin Horse, a documentary on the sex lives of retards and cripples) make sense. Trevor seeks to celebrate the individual, the person who strives for excellence in a world where mediocrity dominates. A guy like tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE may be a total weirdo, but you can’t deny that he’s unique or that he hasn’t succeeded at his life goals. Yes, egoism might have its issues, just like every other belief system, but the will to succeed and achieve is certainly real.

You just need to get off your ass and do something.

For these reasons, I highly recommend Confessions of a Failed Egoist and Other Essays. While you may disagree with it—in fact, it’s all but guaranteed—it’s a book that takes a taser straight to your brain. In a world where upholding pretty lies is a lucrative endeavor, Trevor Blake’s book stands as a ray of sunshine peeking down from the clouds.

Click here to buy Confessions of a Failed Egoist and Other Essays.

Read Next: OVO 20: Juven(a/i)lia by Trevor Blake

Down Where the Devil Don’t Go is a remarkable achievement: the first fictional work that captures the zeitgeist of the Bush years.

Ah yes, you remember those happy days? The nauseating Baby Boomer leftism of Bill Clinton’s America has been hashed out to death by countless GenX prophets: Jim Goad, Mark Ames, Hollister Kopp, the list goes on. And while Dubya’s America was a continuation of Boomer degeneracy, it was of a decidedly different strain. In contrast to the slap-happy PC Stalinism of the nineties, the oughts were defined by the “silent majority” of right-wing Christian Boomers who thought shoving their heads into the sand would make the reality of America’s decline go away. The sly psychopathy of Clinton gave way to the bombastic stupidity of Bush, a man who sunk the U.S. into two pointless wars and tanked the economy just so he could bribe Latinos into voting for him.

To me, the defining moment of that era’s zeitgeist was when John Ashcroft covered up the exposed breasts of statues in the Department of Justice. Ashcroft, a man so pathetic that he lost reelection to a corpse, hid the statues from view because looking at boobies is sinful, a view that none of the Founding Fathers or traditional leaders before him would have held. No incident better elucidates America’s divorce from reality, a divorce only accentuated by the weepy response to 9/11, the militarization of the police and civil service (TSA, CBP, NSA etc.), and the election of a stuttering community organizer to succeed the smirking chimp.

For a blistering, dark look at this psychosis, read Down Where the Devil Don’t Go.

The latest release from thoughtcrime repository Nine-Banded Books, Paul Bingham’s short story collection reads like a mashup of a Coen brothers action movie with one of Andy Nowicki’s novels (indeed, there’s a glowing quote from Nowicki on the book’s back cover). Interestingly, though, my favorite story was the one that didn’t involve much action: “Population I.” The tale of a pretentious Barton Fink-esque “literary” author, the protagonist struggles with writer’s block and his resentment towards his nymphomaniac roommate Rose (a successful erotic novelist), all the while ignoring the truly interesting but declasse characters around him:

His arms are firm all over, and his skin has a delicate chocolate-brown pallor. We are friends now. Neither of us are homosexuals, but if I were sentenced to the penitentiary I would allow Jamal to fuck me; I would bend over and let him fuck me in exchange for protection and the right to touch his muscled biceps and to let him know that someone other than his mother cares for him.

Bingham’s prose has an understated energy, a slow-moving violence, like a fat guy lumbering over to you and socking you in the jaw. Stylistically, his writing has commonalities with the graphic intensity of Nowicki and Ann Sterzinger, though Bingham’s sensibilities are more cinematic; you can almost visualize the ultraviolence of “What the Dead Men Fear” and “I Feel Alright” happening on the big screen. Additionally, Bingham’s stories lack the Catholic/antinatalist undertones of those writers’ works. In his world, there are no lessons to learn, no transformations to be had, no gold at the end of the rainbow.

Stupid people do stupid things right up until the moment it kills them.

“What the Dead Men Fear” is the portion of Down Where the Devil Don’t Go that will probably receive the most attention. A tale revolving around a slutty, Taylor Swift-esque country singer, the story is teeming with hilarious viciousness at the contemporary country scene (Bingham has stated that he was in part motivated to write it by his hatred of Kenny Chesney) and riveting action:

The scene was tight, drifting, surreal. Anything Goes, said a neon sign. On the stage flanking the bar was Sheldon Anson V at his psychobilly best, backed by the Fucking Band and twisting out Brazil’s favorite song. “Redheaded Fuckslut.” It was his favorite because he hadn’t heard it in some time. It was his favorite because he’d never liked it, because absence made the heart grow fond.

“Protocols of the Learned Elders of Hollywood” is a blistering look at our advertising- and image-centric media. It focuses on Mort Schnellenhammer, a TV executive with a comically Mitt Romney-esque inability to understand the tastes of the people he’s trying to cater to. The story’s theme of dehumanization caused by media exposure reminds me of Network, while Schnellenhammer’s interactions with his misfit Palestinian protege Hasan are absolutely hilarious:

“God,” Hasan rhapsodized, still only dimly aware of Schnellenhammer’s presence, “is great, and Mohammed is an asshole. Look at him. Look at the fuck there on TV speaking bullshit for the CAIR this minute. They talk of Zionist oppression while they kill Christian children and collect the moneys for them, because it is a democracy and we are the minority too minor for anyone to care. God, I hate the fucks. They speak in platitudes and fuck democracy in the ass.“

That’s the closest that Down Where the Devil Don’t Go comes to having a message: we’re all getting—and giving it to each other—in the ass without Vaseline. America is a great big mosh pit of venal retards seeking to exploit each other for stupid and petty reasons. Not only that, our society is so large in scale that no one person can be blamed in anything more than a minor way for the cesspool that it is becoming. It’s just one great big orgy of pointless cruelty, millions of morons adding up to a collective of Infinite Idiocy.

But hey, at least we can still laugh at it.

Bottom line, Down Where the Devil Don’t Go is a blisteringly good debut from Paul Bingham. If this is his first published work, I wonder what he’s going to be putting out in the future.

Click here to buy Down Where the Devil Don’t Go.

Read Next: The New York Trilogy by Paul Auster

Language is a tricky thing in our leftist world. Not only are leftists obsessed with inventing words out of whole cloth (“transphobia,” “cis,” “rapey”), they are engaged in a constant struggle to alter the definitions of existing words. This subtle warfare is part of why they have been so successful in implementing their program; people support them because they seemingly support things that everyone wants, such as “justice” and “equality.”

As a tongue-in-cheek guide to leftist terminology, Mediocracy is a worthwhile read.

Fabian Tassano is a satirist in the Swiftian bent; his book begins with a tale about a land called “Telluria” descending into leftist degeneracy and failure. “Mediocracy” is Tassano’s term for the social and economic environment fostered by leftism, in which the individual is subsumed into the collective and everything is dumbed down to the lowest common denominator:

In a mediocracy, we are required to think of ourselves as products of society. The concept of innate ability is considered threatening, as it implies an area that society may not be able to control. A simple way of minimising the significance of intrinsic differences between individuals is to stress those aspects of the person common to everyone, e.g. physiology, aging, sex.

To this end, Mediocracy offers up nearly 200 pages worth of satirical definitions, related in Tassano’s clinically comical prose. Each segment is about a page long, consisting of the mediocratic definition of a word contrasted with its real definition, along with quotes from real-world personalities like Bono and Tony Blair to back up Tassano’s explanations:

A mediocracy likes to take pride in its supposed tolerance. But what exactly is it tolerant of? Sexual activities, rudeness, brutality in movies, certain types of crime, resentment of inequality, other cultures if their membership is large enough.

On the other hand, there are things mediocracy tolerates only grudingly if at all: capital accumulation, celibacy, non-egalitarian theories, non-proletarian versions of masculinity, private medicine, business, Christianity, hierarchy, aristocracy.

Mediocracy covers the gamut from “sex” to “tolerance” to “diversity” to “depression” and more, not only explaining how leftist language manipulation distorts reality, but showing the twisted logic that connects all of these points. Tassano shows that the obscurantism of the left is a feature, not a bug; only by mutilating concepts such as “society” and “culture” can the left survive and thrive in our world. Indeed, he closes the book out with a quote from Orwell’s 1984 concerning Newspeak and thoughtcrime.

I don’t know if Tassano considers himself a reactionary, but his book makes a fine addition to the neoreaction reading list.

My problems with Mediocracy are two. One, Tassano doesn’t go into quite enough detail to fully flesh out the logic of mediocracy, instead counting on the reader to fill in the blanks. While this is fine for those of us immersed in reactionary thought, Mediocracy is a bad book for beginners as it will leave them scratching their heads. Two, a number of the definitions, such as “sacking,” seem like filler and probably could have been cut out.

Aside from these points though, Mediocracy is an amusing and illuminating book explaining just how leftists distort reality and confuse us all.

Click here to buy Mediocracy: Inversions and Deceptions in an Egalitarian Culture.

Read Next: Brains & Brawn: A 30-Day Challenge by Robert Koch

What is the nature of beauty?

In many ways, extreme beauty can be terrifying, mainly because beauty is inhuman. The human race is ugly to average; obese Section 8 baby mamas, moralizing Baptists, drugged-up gays plugging each other in public bathrooms. When a man sees a beautiful woman, or a person in general sees a virtuous individual, their instinctive reaction is fear, fear of something that is rare, uncommon, and potentially dangerous.

Man is not a learning animal.

Beauty and the Least, Andy Nowicki’s latest work, is something of a departure from his usual oeuvre. A brief novella with elements of philosophy, it’s about the terror and reverence that beauty inspires in men. While it’s not his best work, Beauty and the Least’s crisp prose and daring approach to its subject matter makes it worth a buy.

On the surface, Beauty begins in familiar waters for Nowicki: the tale of another creepy yet compelling loser. The unnamed protagonist in Beauty is a middle-aged teacher who becomes smitten with a teenage girl, eventually moving to outright stalk her… at which point the book becomes something stranger:

Now it so happened that, with beauty’s poison surging under my skin, inducing a mounting malignancy of madness, I somehow hit upon this notion of name-knowledge as the one thing needful. It was this quest for nominal quarry that set me off on my initial act of fanatical imprudence. Seized by an idea, I carefully trailed my love after she departed from Mass one Sunday. It happened that she and I were both unattended on this day, her boyfriend being out of town for a weekend playoff game in another state; her parents having attended an earlier Mass; my children being home with my wife. It was an opportunity that I seized upon with wild, unthinking eagerness. In the narthex, I lurked unobtrusively, pretending to scrutinize a church bulletin while my target chatted with a few friends; then I peeled away as she made a beeline for her vehicle, a silver Mercedes minivan which surely she shared with her parents. Carefully, keeping my eyes at a level position, I glanced casually at the car’s license plate, excitedly memorizing the swirl of digits and letters as I strode to my own vehicle with excitement charging through my feverishly pounding heart.

Nowicki has a remarkable gift for taking self-pitying, deluded characters and playing them in such a way that their mishaps become high comedy. Beauty’s protagonist praises his obsession in ways that would be dramatic were they not played against the pathetic reality of his life. The book is brief (only about 30 some-odd pages once you exclude publisher Ann Sterzinger’s note at the beginning), yet it hits with you with the gravitas of a longer work, as Nowicki hurls scenarios at you and avoids wasting your time.

On a technical level, Beauty and the Least is on par with Nowicki’s prior works. It’s told from a first-person perspective, hearkening back to his first novel, the epistolary Considering Suicide, though this book is considerably more focused and impactful. Beauty also lacks Nowicki’s typical penchant for disturbing (albeit meaningful) violence, making it a good introduction for those who might be turned off by the more extreme elements of his work:

To be sure, I have long felt drawn to that which is beautiful. Indeed, how can one not do so? Beauty is all that one has in this bleak world; it is our only taste of heaven; yet beauty, far from being life-giving, is instead cruelly toxic. One must somehow take it into one’s heart without actually ingesting it, for absorbing beauty—that is to say, attempting to draw it into your bosom and make it your own—leads to death. I committed this crucial error. I presumed to take beauty into my very being, and now I am dying, for beauty is indeed poison.

While I won’t give away the ending, Beauty and the Least raises some scintillating questions about the nature of beauty. Our intrepid protagonist pursues beauty like a moth drawn to a lamp: mesmerized by it, he doesn’t realize how it can destroy him. Indeed, as his obsession with “Eve” (as he calls his beloved, casting himself into the role of the serpent) consumes every aspect of his life, the protagonist’s impotence gives way to action… of a sort.

In particular, the way the story concludes surprised me, mainly because it wasn’t as… gory as I’ve come to expect from Nowicki.

The one area I’d fault Beauty and the Least in is length. While, as I said, it gets to the point and doesn’t waste your time, in many ways it feels incomplete. When I finished it, I couldn’t help but feel that it would have made a good centerpiece to a collection of thematically linked short stories. That’s just the impression I got, though.

Otherwise, Beauty and the Least is another quality release from Andy Nowicki and definitely worth your time.

Click here to buy Beauty and the Least.

Read Next: Under the Nihil by Andy Nowicki

Journey to the End of the Night was Céline’s first novel and his most famous, but not his best; that honor goes to his later works. And while I have a soft spot for Journey, I’ll readily admit that Death on the Installment Plan is the superior novel in terms of content and form. Céline had further refined his disjointed, elliptical writing style, bringing with it an increasingly cynical, bleak view of the world he inhabited.

Compared to Death, Journey is a children’s book; this is where the true darkness begins.

Death on the Installment Plan is both sequel and prequel to Journey, continuing the misadventures of his literary surrogate Ferdinand Bardamu. The opening picks up where the previous novel left off; Bardamu is a struggling doctor in the Parisian slums, regularly cheated by his poor patients and abused by his friends and co-workers. Céline’s narration frequently blurs the line between reality and fantasy, to the point where they become indistinguishable:

The grass is full of them, thousands are pouring down the drive. More and more of them come stepping out of the darkness… The women’s dresses are in tatters, tits torn and dangling… little boys without pants… they knock each other down, trample each other, toss each other up in the air… some are left dangling from the trees… along with smashed-up chairs… An old bag, English, comes along in a little car and sticks her head out the window so far it almost falls off… she was beginning to get in my way. Never had I seen eyes so full of happiness. “Hurray! Hurray!” she shouts without even stopping her car. “Great stuff! You’ll crack her ass open. You’ll send her sky-high. You’ll knock the eternity out of her. Hurray for Christian Science!”

While the initial hundred pages of Death are styled like Journey, Céline’s ellipses become more prominent as the narrative slogs on, imitating the fragmented and whirlwind nature of life itself. Despite both this and the language barrier, Death is an absolute joy to read, as Céline’s prose and humor had me cracking up every other paragraph. Much like in Journey, French vernacular phrases and references that can’t be translated in English are placed in a glossary at the end of the book, though there are thankfully far fewer of them.

After a violent visit from his mother, Bardamu moves into discussing his childhood; his frequent beatings at the hands of Auguste, his failed insurance clerk father, and routinely emasculated by his mother. Of course, young Ferdinand does his best to be a complete weirdo, constantly talking about how he always had “shit on [his] ass” because he was too busy to wipe, stinking up everywhere he goes with his reek. Sent to work as a salesman, he gets fired for slinking off to the back storerooms to slake his masturbation addiction:

Along around five o’clock he went out for a cup of coffee, and I took the opportunity to take my shoes off for a minute up in the stockroom. I’d do it in the can too when nobody was there. So one day those cocksuckers go and tell the boss. Lavelongue did a hundred-yard dash, I was his obsession… He was there in two seconds flat.

“Will you come out of there, you little skunk? Is that what you call working?… Jerking yourself off in every corner you can find… Is that your way of learning the trade?… Flat on your ass with your dick in the air!… That’s the younger generation for you!”

Every attempt his parents make to turn Bardamu into a productive member of society fails. They apprentice him to another businessman, where he gets fired for jacking off on the job again. They send him to a boarding school in England, where he flunks out after pigheadedly refusing to learn a word of English and spending his free time getting handjobs from a retarded kid. Finally, they apprentice him to the inventor-cum-con man Courtial des Pereires, a schemer constantly trying to scam money for his next big project.

This is the true darkness of Death: Céline turns his cynical gaze on himself. Any emo idiot can cry and whine about how other people are cruel, stupid and greedy; it takes true courage to apply that same standard to yourself. Furthermore, at no point does Céline ask for sympathy. He recognizes everything that happens to him, from his dalliances with the diseased slut Mireille to his scamming with Courtial as the font of comedy that it is, playing up the humor in life’s pointlessness. In this, his characterization is far stronger than his bathetic contemporaries, to the point where inanimate objects such as the Génitron (Courtial’s maze-like laboratory) and the worn-out hot air balloon that Bardamu is constantly forced to patch up become characters in and of themselves.

And it’s these reasons why Céline is the greatest author of the twentieth century.

Death on the Installment Plan, Journey and Céline’s other novels capture not just the atmosphere of everyday life, but it’s very essence. The fragmented sentences, the ellipses, the constant shifting of places and people all imitate the rush of life itself, the nature of human existence as a long series of half-remembered events. Céline’s work exists at the intersection of reality and memory, where history fades into the recesses of our imagination, bluster and senility and confusion blending together.

And while life might be cruel and short, it’s still funny as all hell.

If you haven’t read Journey to the End of the Night, read that first, but otherwise, Death on the Installment Plan is a glorious triumph. It may not be for the faint of heart, but good art rarely is.

Click here to buy Death on the Installment Plan.

Read Next: Journey to the End of the Night by Louis-Ferdinand Céline

Never have I wanted to throttle the author of a book so badly.

It’s a friendly throttling, mostly; City of Singles, the debut novel by Jason Bryan (who is active on Twitter as “Dylen Durret“), is an intriguing portrait of life in our sexually liberated, post-feminist society. A semi-autobiographical book, it follows several weeks in the life of hard-partying porn mogul Dylen Durrett as he drinks and bangs his way through Vancouver’s most eligible bachelorettes. It’s a familiar premise, but Bryan has the talent and experience to pull off a truly fantastic story here.

That’s why the book’s failure is all the more maddening.

The smart move would have been to write City of Singles as a black comedy. Instead, Bryan adopts the phony poor-little-rich-boy tone of Bret Easton Ellis and James Frey, lamenting about how awful it is that romance and love are dead. Yes Dylen, it’s so terrible that you have a revolving door of attractive young women sucking your dick all the time. It’s a complete injustice that you get to make a living hocking smut from your home computer, giving you ample time to down Jim Beam and play Skyrim in your free time. Oh, the gut-wrenching humanity of it all!

It’s this thematic blunder combined with Bryan’s uneven prose that knocks City of Singles out of the upper echelons of fiction. While Bryan has a keen eye for dialogue, all too often he slips into the godawful “writerly writing” style of Jonathan Franzen, which is to say he overwrites. All the time. Take this sampler from the first chapter, about the aftermath of yet another hookup:

Sitting up wasn’t such a good idea. The world is dancing under me and I can’t see straight. The floor will quickly become my destination again should these party legs decide to stand up. Come on man, one hand, other foot, now another hand, another foot. We spend such a small amount of time crawling as children, then again as alcoholics. Her hazel eyes reminded me of Kentucky bourbon after a few cubes melted in a tumbler. Wonder if she has a Tumblr. Fuck this. The whole room is spinning, that’s never good in an open concept loft. It’s not possible to stare at anything for too long without a rolling ocean wave throwing my eyes off. There are shiny floors for light to play tricks on, high ceilings for that vertigo, no soft carpet to cushion a fall. My skin’s sweaty in the way a smokie sausage blisters over flame. Something’s coming up, fuck. Retching is never fun. That first gag hits your mind like the phrase ‘We need to talk,’ or ‘Have a seat over there.’ Posting up on one arm, never thought that a little jiu jitsu would help me get to a toilet to puke faster. Throw my feet under me, go! The wet smacking sound of clumsy meat hitting concrete, my mind went silent for a few nervous steps. Almost, almost, just a couple more. With precise timing of chin pimples before first dates, gravity acts up to throw me shoulder-first into the bathroom sinks.

And this is just one paragraph from the first chapter! What’s the endgame of all this purple prose? To tell you that Dylen has a hangover and he fucked some cute girl last night. That’s it. But Bryan insists on dragging out every description, every little thing he says or does several sentences or paragraphs longer than is necessary. While he has a talent for metaphors (I particularly enjoyed his description of dried-up vomit stuck in his chest hair), after a while you want to scream: “Will you just get to the POINT already?”

And to his credit, Bryan does get to the point… eventually. The book wanders through the minutiae of his daily life: selling porn, playing computer games, and getting laid with a never-ending carousel of pretty young things. The book picks up steam about a third of the way in as we’re introduced to Dylen’s best friend Doug and his girl pals Misha and Kiki. While no one would ever call this a particularly plot-heavy book, a couple of twists near the end grabbed me and kept me going even through the most obnoxious segments.

Unfortunately, I have to downgrade City of Singles due to the insulting tone.

When he’s at his best, Bryan paints a darkly comic picture of Vancouver’s singles scene, a world where attractive girls cheat on their boyfriends and people sleep around and party without any concern for what tomorrow will bring. The problem is Dylen’s unbearable whining about the emptiness of it all. Despite having what every guy on Earth wants—a neverending stream of cute girls who want his cock—the guy keeps moping about how he just wants to settle down with one girl he can love.

It’s not just fake, it’s cliched beyond all reason.

Look, the pointlessness and loneliness of the modern singles scene is a worthy topic to address, and I can understand where Bryan’s coming from. But this isn’t the way to do it. Reading City of Singles flashed me back to Ramon Glazov’s epic takedown of David Foster Wallace, where he described the bathetic tone of anti-drug/anti-sex lit like Infinite Jest and Less Than Zero as being lifted from Augustine’s Confessions.

The problem with this is that the reason why Augustine was so OCD about his sins was because he was afraid of going to hell when he died.

When you transplant the Augustinian story structure into a secular setting, it always, and I mean always fails. In Confessions, being selfish or gluttonous carries actual, material consequences; in the real world, who cares? You’ve got all the cocaine, whiskey and hot sluts you could possibly want! What the fuck are you complaining about? Please don’t try and tell me that your existential ennui is equivalent to getting butt-raped by Satan for all eternity, because it isn’t. In this respect, City of Singles reminds me of Donlak’s novel The Refugee, and not in a good way.

Jesus, both Donlak and Bryan are from Vancouver too! Seriously, is there something in the water up there?

It’s this combined with Bryan’s morbid obsession with seeing how many metaphors he can pack into a single paragraph that forces me to downgrade City of Singles somewhat. If you can look past these flaws, though, the novel is a stark, gritty and engrossing exploration of modern masculinity and femininity. If Bryan takes these criticisms to heart on his next project, he’ll be able to put out something truly spectacular.

Click here to buy City of Singles.

Read Next: Black Passenger Yellow Cabs: Of Exile and Excess in Japan by Stefhen F.D. Bryan

The most recent release from Lloyd Fonvielle, Christmas in the West is a collection of six short stories set in various time periods in the West. While the majority of them are authentic Westerns, “Christmas in December” is set in contemporary times and “Twilight” takes place during World War II:

We didn’t push the horses too hard on the way back to El Paso del Norte, which turned out to be a terrible mistake. A few miles outside of town we looked back and saw a band of twenty men riding hard after us. It was difficult to be sure, but it looked as though Emilio Fernandez was riding at the front of them. He wore a particular black sombrero with a lot of silver sewed on it, and I seemed to recognize it.

If you’ve read Fonvielle’s previous work, Christmas in the West is largely more of the same. His characterization and plotting is as tight as ever, interweaving characters from all walks of life in a believable, honest and non-sentimental way. My personal favorite story is the aforementioned “Christmas in December,” about a neglected young man who takes up with a Vegas escort, deftly avoiding even the slightest hint of bathos:

She said, “My name is Felina. I don’t care if you cry. You can cry all you want to. You sound like you’ve got some stuff to cry about. My daddy was a drunk, too. He walked out on me and Mama when I was six. This was in Ciudad Juarez, in Mexico. That’s where I was born. My mama was an American citizen, though, which made me an American citizen. I got lucky there.”

If you’re looking for a brief but enjoyable fiction collection, Christmas in the West is worth a read.

Click here to buy Christmas in the West.

Read Next: Missouri Green by Lloyd Fonvielle

This book is trash.

I bought The Gringo Trail after seeing it referenced favorably in a negative review of Roosh’s A Dead Bat in Paraguay. I don’t know why I took the opinion of some pantshitting anonymous feminist seriously, but there you go. A decade ago, when this book was originally published, The Gringo Trail might have been passable. Now?

It’s not simply a crummy, solipsistic, poorly-written dirge, it’s revolting in its hypocrisy.

The premise of the memoir is that it’s about three English hippies who hit the fabled “gringo trail” in South America to party, do drugs and visit tourist traps. There’s the narrator, who goes unnamed Fight Club-style but I’ll simply call “Pimpledick,” his half-Chinese delinquent girlfriend Melissa, and Mark (presumably not Mark Mann himself), a hard-partying layabout who is constantly mooching off his friends. No, seriously; Pimpledick has to give him a loan so he can even afford the trip:

What I actually meant was that I wanted to travel myself, and Mark seemed a good companion. Not perfect: he was too selfish and intense. But you had to accept Mark for what he was. He had a vitality, an energy. Mark thought he was Superman, invincible and indestrucible, and when you were with him, he tended to make you feel the same way too. Life was a game. Weird things happened (such as the time someone fed his Doberman a tab of LSD and it ejaculated all over the carpet in the middle of a party). He was also, I figured, a useful person to have along if things ever got ugly. If we were arrested, or had to fight our way out of some dark Third World backstreet. Mark could handle that sort of shit — even if he did make it more likely to happen in the first place.

The immediate problem with The Gringo Trail is Mann’s awful writing style. His prose washes over you like a Chipotle fart in an elevator: rancid, suffocating and forgettable all at once. Pimpledick, Melissa and Mark journey all over northwestern South America, from Ecuador to Bolivia and back up to Colombia, but the sights and sounds of their journey are almost unreadable due to his run-on sentences and cliched descriptions. I don’t how he managed to make backpacking through dangerous cliffs, desperado-infested jungles and more as uninteresting as a day at the office, but he pulled it off.

But what really hacked me off about Mann is his nauseating priggishness.

In an attempt to add historical context to his pointless wanderings, Mann frequently quotes from that dreaded ur-text of ethnic studies, Open Veins of Latin America. In fact, he quotes that book so often that Eduardo Galeano really ought to sue him for copyright infringement. Every other page, there’s a whiny digression on how awful it is that Latin America has been so cruelly exploited by foreign imperialists over the centuries, from the Spanish to the Americans:

The Spanish destroyed the ayllus. They divided the land into estates, called encomiendas, each owned by a Spanish encomendero. Indians within each estate had to support their new Lord. The Spanish crown piously instructed the encomenderos take less from the peasants than the Incas, but in far-away Peru this half-hearted request was ignored, and the encomenderos worked ‘their’ Indians to death. The only duty required of them in return was to teach Christianity.

Uh Marky boy, aren’t you forgetting something? Like the entire 19th century, where it was your country that was buttfucking Latin America for profit? Don’t lie to me that you don’t know; I read Open Veins of Latin America when I was a kid and Galeano details exactly how Britain took advantage of the end of Spanish hegemony in Latin America to pillage the place. From turning Uruguay into a glorified satrapy to manipulating Peru and Chile into the War of the Pacific to nearly exterminating the Paraguayans in one of the most destructive wars in history, Britain’s bloody history south of the border should merit some kind of mention.

For all his hand-wringing about exploitation, Mann doesn’t mention Britain’s imperialism in Latin America once.

This is why I despite British leftists, more so than leftists from anywhere else. Robert Fisk, George Galloway, Christopher Hitchens, Joe Strummer: all of them morally bankrupt, craven, disgusting hypocrites. These hatchet men love to wax pious about the sins of America, Germany, Russia or whoever, but they never apply that same standard on their own country. Limeys in general have a collective amnesia about the horrors they’ve inflicted on the world, but the Tories at least have an excuse.

Brit lefties wag their fingers at the U.S. for our treatment of Indians, at the French for their treatment of Algerians, at Belgians for the Congo, but they will never talk about how Victorian Britain conducted a mini-genocide on native Sri Lankans. They’ll never mention how Britain invaded Tibet out of boredom, casually slaughtering natives who were armed with swords and century-old matchlock muskets. They’ll never bring up the Boer War, where the British used concentration camps as a means to combat the Boer insurgency, where a full quarter of Boer women and children died from starvation and disease.

And they will never in a million years acknowledge Ireland.

Want a nice, dark lesson in human nature? Try getting any Brit—leftist or otherwise—to admit that the Irish potato famine was an intentional genocide. Because it was. The Anglo-Puritan claim that the famine just sort of happened is a complete lie. If you want to fight me on this, you better be prepared to explain why even during the worst years of the famine, Ireland was still a net exporter of food.

Answer: the Irish starved by the thousands because London let them.

The British have and will always view the Irish as less than human. “Filthy, dirty Papists, worshipping Mary and getting drunk all the time. To hell with them.” When the famine struck, the government specifically refused to extend any aid to the Irish because they wanted to thin the herd. Fewer micks, fewer mouths to feed, more riches for us was their logic. Forget reparations, forget apologies: to this day the British won’t even acknowledge the Irish genocide, let alone the Cromwellian conquest or the other atrocities they afflicted on that long-suffering land.

Were it not for the Irish diaspora to America, it’s doubtful that anyone would remember the potato famine at all.

I don’t know why I was expecting introspection from this Mark Mann asshole, considering that the guy’s petulance would prevent him from comprehending this post even if I were to print it out and staple gun it to his forehead. In another chapter, he whines about how the Thatcherite ascendancy kept him from getting the cushy government job he always wanted:

I spent the next few years in dull jobs, waiting for something else to throw my heart into. But privatising, tax-cutting Britain in the early Nineties was no place for idealists. The Cold War had been won and lost. Communism was dead. An idiotic voting system and the cowardice of the Labour Party kept green issues off the agenda. The ecstasy/rave scene seemed Britain’s only dynamic movement but appeared to offer little beyond dancing oneself into oblivion for a night or two. Which is fine. But these were desperate times. They demanded something more.

Oh fuck you, you spoiled little brat! You’re wealthy enough to spend six months dropping acid in Colombia and traipsing around the goddamn jungle and all you can do is complain? This poor-little-rich-boy cant informs the entire book, right down to when he and his buddies start complaining about the “invisibility” of Indians in Bolivia. Yeah, it’s a real tragedy that Latin American TV mostly features white people. Couldn’t have anything to do with the fact that South American Indians are hideously ugly, it’s just more evidence of raaacccism!

That’s the entirety of The Gringo Trail: sloppily written descriptions of Pimpledick’s adventures interspaced with crybaby rants and hypocritical hand-wringing. The nicest thing I can say about the book is that Mark dies at the end; not Mark Mann unfortunately, though a man can dream. Yep, the obnoxious little sponge Mark drowns at sea and has his body mutilated by sharks. I admit I got a few chuckles out of the Kafka-esque process it took for Pimpledick to report his death to the Colombian police, but it doesn’t make the remaining 300 pages any more readable.

The Gringo Trail is the mainstream, watered-down version of adventure writing. It has no bite, no balls and no honesty. If you want a tale of debauchery, exploration and masculinity, read Roosh’s A Dead Bat in Paraguay instead; it is everything that The Gringo Trail isn’t.

Click here to buy The Gringo Trail.

Read Next: Naughty Nomad: Not Your Typical Backpacker Story by Mark Zolo

ETX’s most recent book, Grammar Slammer is a self-explanatory guide to grammar, aimed squarely at those teaching English abroad. While it’d be easy to compare it to his previous teaching book, Speaking Activities That Don’t Suck, Grammar Slammer is considerably more involved than that book due to the bizarre, conflicting and strange (at least from an outsider’s perspective) rules of English grammar. Hell, I majored in English in college and even I didn’t know much of this stuff:

SO, a NOUN can broadly be described as a person, place, thing or idea. Rock, car, China, sunglasses, rash, eucalyptus, coronary, slut, Armageddon, pancreas – all nouns.

A VERB is a word that describes an action. Jump, die, congregate, ponder, vomit, recoil, pace, slide, reanimate, pamper. These are all verbs.

ETX explains just about every aspect of English grammar you could think of and a few that never would have occurred to me, such as the present perfect continuous and all sorts of other strange stuff. Per usual, Grammar Slammer is seasoned with his bleak, dark humor, which makes the bitter medicine he’s serving go down that much easier:

I’m meeting my baby-mama for dinner tonight at 8:00 pm.

We’re working until 9:00 pm tonight; we can’t come to the Amway meeting.

He’s seeing an opera next Thursday at 4:00 pm. Man, he’s desperate to get laid.

I’m taking my girlfriend to the Seychelles next July. Or so she thinks.

Famed terrorist Tarantula Bob is killing the President tonight at 8:30 pm.

I wouldn’t exactly call Grammar Slammer a must-buy, but unlike Speaking Activities That Don’t Suck, it’s worth a look even if you have no interest in teaching English. It’s a surprisingly informative book with applications outside of teaching English abroad. I liked it as it helped me better understand how the English language works.

Click here to buy Grammar Slammer.

Read Next: Speaking Activities That Don’t Suck by English Teacher X

If there’s one theme that links the Coen brothers’ films together, it’s this: the unrelenting, pointless cruelty of life. Whether it’s John Turturro’s snotty Hollywood scriptwriter receiving his comeuppance in Barton Fink, the circular, petty plots the Dude is ensnared in in The Big Lebowski, or the murderous self-absorption of the main characters in Burn After Reading, the Coens’ ability to capture American culture in all its banal ugliness is unmatched.

If it weren’t for the fact that their movies are so damn funny, they’d have been lynched decades ago.

I was finally able to see Inside Llewyn Davis, their latest flick, last week, and I’m still astounded that these guys are able to find paying work. While not the Coens’ best work, it’s a gripping and hilarious film, but its central theme is completely subversive and a negation of everything that Americans believe in.

Inside Llewyn Davis states that even if you’re smart, dedicated and talented, you can still fail, and in fact you probably will.

This very concept is anathema to Americans, even as the majority of them live it on a daily basis. Our national narrative is based around the Puritan fiction that anyone can succeed if only they “pull themselves up by their bootstraps.” If you fail, it’s always your fault; you just weren’t good enough. It ignores the fact that the majority of people throughout human history have been broke nobodies who struggled to survive on a day-to-day basis.

Inside Llewyn Davis revolves around the eponymous protagonist (Oscar Isaac), a folk musician struggling to make a living in early 1960’s Greenwich Village, a part of the same music scene that birthed Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell and Ramblin’ Jack Elliott. (Indeed, while the movie is fictional, the Coens based the story in part off of Dave Van Ronk’s memoir The Mayor of MacDougal Street.) Llewyn is no rich kid from the suburbs slumming it; he’s an immensely talented guitarist, singer and lyricist with two records to his name, playing regular gigs at all the famous Manhattan folk venues.

Too bad he just can’t catch a break.

Homeless and perpetually broke, Llewyn spends his days preoccupied with finding a couch to crash for the night and bumming money off his friends, most of whom aren’t much better off. Every attempt he makes to advance himself gets thwarted, every mistake he makes is amplified, leaving him perpetually running the hamster wheel. And as all these little iniquities add up, Llewyn ends up alienating and pushing away his friends, who continue to try and help him even as he repeatedly burns them.

It’s disturbing how accurate the Coens’ depiction of this kind of poverty, the life of the “honest homeless,” is. Having tasted this kind of poverty (albeit briefly), I can speak from personal experience: most of the misery of being at the bottom rung of society comes not from big, life-threatening problems, but tiny ones that combine to form chain reactions of pain and irritation. Screw-ups that wouldn’t even be noticed by wealthier people will blow up in your face, and if you can’t correctly guess what you need to do to get out of the hole, all your progress can be undone in an instant.

The first part of Inside Llewyn Davis shows this perfectly. Llewyn has to scrape together enough money for an abortion after knocking up his on- and off-again paramour Jean (Carey Mulligan). To help him out, Jean’s boyfriend Jim (Justin Timberlake) hires Llewyn to play on the studio recording of his godawful novelty tune “Please, Mr. Kennedy.” Desperate for cash, Llewyn waives his rights to song royalties in favor of an up-front payment. Traipsing down to the clinic, he’s stunned when the doctor agrees to do the abortion free of charge because the last girl Llewyn sent there opted to keep the baby, and because he didn’t have a phone number or permanent address, the doctor couldn’t give him a refund.

Finally, near the film’s close, a couple of Llewyn’s acquaintances mention how they love “Please Mr. Kennedy,” implying that it will become a hit… which he won’t see a penny of.

That’s life when you’re poor: an eternal Sisyphean grind of low-level tribulations. It’s why whenever I read someone like Dr. Illusion writing about “Fight for 15” and how the poor just need to “get skills,” a part of me wants to punch them in the face. It’s not that simple. “Getting skills” is a distant dream when your salary barely covers the rent, when you have to choose between heat and food, when you’re taking out payday loans so you can pay off payday loans that you got because your $800 car broke down or you caught strep from one of your degenerate customers.

It also assumes that the kinds of people stuck making French fries at Wendy’s are smart and dedicated enough to work out of the position on their own; most aren’t.

No, I don’t think raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour is a solution. But neither is lecturing people about the sanctity of hard work from the comfort of your Barcalounger.

Inside Llewyn Davis’ most enduring symbol of this lifestyle is the cute tabby cat that Llewyn totes around wherever he goes. It’s yet another example of the chain reactions that keep people in poverty; at the beginning of the movie, it escapes from the apartment where Llewyn is staying, and lacking a key, he has no choice but to take it with him. The cat then escapes from Jim and Jean’s apartment, where Llewyn crashes for the night, and he spends the better part of the next day trying to find it and failing, much to Jean’s disgust. Given that the guy is homeless and broke, why would he be focused on finding a fucking cat?

Answer: because when everything is spiraling out of control, you’ll latch onto anything that allows you to assert some authority over your life, no matter how minor or irrelevant.

The film is helped along by its first-rate cinematography and acting. In contrast to the expansive landscapes of Roger Deakins, the Coens’ usual cinematographer, Inside Llewyn Davis depicts sixties-era New York City in an array of dismal whites, browns and blacks. You can practically smell the dried urine and Marlboro smoke as Llewyn rides the subway up and down Manhattan. As for the actors, just about everyone does a superb job, with the possible exception of Justin Timberlake (whose role is mercifully small); John Goodman absolutely steals the show later on as an obnoxious jazzman who belittles and mocks Llewyn (“Folk singer with a cat. You queer?”). Adam Driver, of Girls fame, also has a bit role during the “Please, Mr. Kennedy” scene; turns out that the kid can really act when Lena Dunham isn’t pulling on his nuts.

It’s a wonder that making movies like this is still legal.

This is why you owe it to yourself to watch Inside Llewyn Davis. It’s funny, smart, and honest above all else. If film is the most uniquely American art form, the Coen brothers are our Shakespeare and Michelangelo combined.

Read Next: As I Walk These Broken Roads by Davis M.J. Aurini