Lost Violent Souls by Andy Nowicki

Andy Nowicki is evolving. Where it’s by accident or design, he’s evolving.

Oh, to be sure, he’s still writing about the same stuff. Lost Violent Souls’ will be instantly recognizable to anyone who’s read any of Nowicki’s previous books. Its five short stories expound upon the same themes: self-immolating losers emasculated by women, rejected by society, and furiously stalwart in their pariah status and their anti-life philosophies. But like a boat cast adrift on a river, Nowicki’s writing is slowly drifting into new territory, whether he’s aware of it or not.

It’s this that makes Lost Violent Souls an amazing read.

Unlike The Doctor and the Heretic and Other Stories, Nowicki’s previous story compilation, Lost Violent Souls’ stories are thematically linked around the idea of suicide. Each of them feature protagonists or main characters who either kill themselves or are haunted by the idea of doing so, as well as a few folks who want to bring others down with them:

“I always wondered what it would be like to be on death row,” he says, scrutinizing his placemat. “To know that this is your last night, your last morning, your last meal. Now I know. It’s only when you’re about to die that you’re really aware of what life means. It’s just… unreal.” He throws out the final word with a shrug, like he is aware that a better word may exist to describe this state of mind, but that he’s come to see the futility in attempting exactitude of language.

Lost Violent Souls comprises five stories, each featuring a noticeably different style. The lead-off tale, “Morning in America,” concerns two teenage outcasts plotting a spree shooting (or as they call it, the “Day of the Gun”) at a diner, all the while professing their hatred for sex and the world. It sounds heady, but Nowicki turns their desperate, angry dialogue into a black comedy routine, Kurt Cobain meets the Unabomber.

If you’re looking for sentimentality, you better look somewhere else.

“Oswald Takes Aim” is likely to become the book’s most notable story, as it concerns a world in which Lee Harvey Oswald chickened out when it came to blowing John F. Kennedy’s brains out. As far as alternate history goes, it’s a damn sight better than the ending of Nowicki’s previous novel Heart Killer in terms of plausibility. Fortunately, Nowicki wisely focuses the story not on history, but on Oswald’s relationship with his domineering Russian wife, who routinely belittles and emasculates him:

Marina shook her head and scrutinized her long- missing husband, a familiar expression of disdain returning to her once-lovely features, which had hardened severely with age. Lee just never learned! No matter how many regimes dismissed him as a barely-educated bumpkin, the man never even for a moment wondered if they may have a point. Instead, he always felt thoroughly convinced that he was destined for greatness. It was quite pathetic, really. The notion that a nobody like Oswald could actually have it in him to alter the course of history!

Longtime Nowicki fans will notice a decisive shift in his prose, reflecting his growing confidence as a writer. His earlier novels and short stories were marked by a jittery energy, the nervousness of a first-time author; The Doctor and the Heretic and Other Stories, in particular, exuded a certain degree of fear in its language. No more. Lost Violent Souls is written with a shocking decisiveness—or at least as much decisiveness as you can get when your protagonists are all losers and washouts—and a clarity of language that makes its stories all the more poignant. Additionally, he confronts sex in a more aggressive, anhedonic way; this was foreshadowed in Heart Killer, but the sexual liaisons in Lost Violent Souls will almost make you want to declare a vow of celibacy.

These elements are on display in the book’s two standout stories, “The Poet’s Wager” and “The Wooden Buddha.” The former concerns a newly-unemployed English professor who visits his therapist for the last time before planning to commit suicide; it’s reminiscent of “The Doctor and the Heretic,” only more believable and written from the patient’s perspective. “The Wooden Buddha,” which follows “The Poet’s Wager” and could almost fool you into thinking that it’s a continuation of that story, concerns an unhappily married English teacher who embarks on an affair with one of his colleagues, written in the guise of a letter to his therapist:

After she climaxed, Eva asked me to stop the car. It was the first time she’d spoken since coming aboard, and I did as she asked, pulling into a secluded little wooded alcove. She promptly unzipped my pants and caught my erection in her mouth. She sucked hungrily yet tenderly; then, just as I was nearly at my tipping point, she lifted her head and muttered, “take me” in my ear, before peeling off her underwear and straddling me in the driver’s seat, and I touched her hips as she came again, and felt a fragility in her skin, a frailty in her bones, a desperation in her thrust. As I climaxed, a strange thought suddenly struck my mind: was she still trying to conceive? Did she somehow think that a miracle could bring life to the barren womb, and further, that she could summon forth the soul of the very child she had killed? Could a mad, hopeless drive to undo the choices of the past be the flame that stoked her passion?

That’s the thin red line connecting Lost Violent Souls’ protagonists: alienation. Whether it’s the corny teenage doofuses reading poetry in “Morning in America” or the doomed liaison of Dr. Eva Mesmer and the protagonist of “The Wooden Buddha,” all of Nowicki’s characters are profoundly out of step with humanity, desperately trying to make something of themselves… and failing. Lee Harvey Oswald floats from regime to regime trying to make something of himself; “The Wooden Buddha’s” narrator harbors regret over him and his wife’s failure to have a child; Eva Mesmer retains her guilt about being pressured into an abortion.

Their suicidal ideation isn’t the product of cowardice, but of conviction.

They’ve had it with a world that despises and disrespects them. They’re tired of the iniquities of life in a world where people only live to fuck, watch TV and stuff their faces. And they’re willing to die for their beliefs rather than succumb to sex-addled fatassitude, a metaphorical death by a thousand cuts. Say what you will about Nowicki’s protagonists—they’re self-important, antisocial, broken weirdos—but their tragic lives make them compelling and interesting characters.

The one major misstep in Lost Violent Souls is the last story, “Motel Man.” It’s ostensibly about this quasi-secret organization of monks who have one of their members infiltrate the motel industry, but its vague style and lack of strong characters make it a weak entry in the book. Fortunately, it’s relatively short.

Otherwise, Lost Violent Souls is yet another standout release from Nowicki. If you’ve read his previous books, it’s a must-buy; if you haven’t, it’s a good place to start. I look forward to seeing what Nowicki does next.

Click here to buy Lost Violent Souls.

Read Next: The Doctor and the Heretic and Other Stories by Andy Nowicki

The Key Logger: A Forbidden Glimpse Into the True Nature of Women by Nicholas Jack

Every so often, you come across a book that completely upends your worldview. After reading it, you might feel angry, sad, happy or whatever, but you won’t see things the same way ever again. Even if the book contains information that you might have already known or suspected to be true, the evidence it lays out can shake you to your very core.

The Key Logger is such a book.

Nicholas Jack (aka 20Nation) sent me a review copy of The Key Logger after I said some nice things about his previous book, The Perfect Conversation. Unlike that book, this is not a practical advice guide. Reading it will not help you get laid. However, you have to read this book because it provides conclusive evidence about the nature of girls, information that you need in order to protect yourself in the shark tank of modern sexual relations.

In fact, The Key Logger is so good that I’m willing to overlook flaws that would annoy me in other books. For example, Jack could use a decent editor. His prose is overly workmanlike and lacks punch, which drags down the book at points. Additionally, the book has a number of typos and grammatical errors that a decent copyeditor could have weeded out:

For thousands of years women have been not been able to get what they wanted by physical force; they have been forced to learn how to get others to do their bidding. Over time this has made them very good at manipulating men. Women use lies to manipulate men into doing what they want. It’s nothing except how nature has designed them.

It’s a testament to the importance of what Jack is writing about that The Key Logger remains absolutely gripping despite its issues; I finished it in a half-hour.

The premise of The Key Logger is rather unique; it’s about how Jack secretly installed a key logger on his computer so he could spy on his girlfriends’ Facebook and email accounts. The book follows ten separate girls he used the key logger on, covering the range from an innocent “good girl” to a hard-partying Paris Hilton wannabe to a nutty slut looking to cuckold her husband, and all of them behave in the exact same way:

She had been messaging him trying to see him again and he had been blowing her off, it looked like he had only been interested in sex. I looked at his profile, and he was a particularly good looking guy. She still kept in contact with him.

That’s right: all of these girls were keeping men on the side, which they “conveniently” failed to tell Jack about. Whether it was an ex-boyfriend that they kept messaging on Facebook, other men they were dating at the same time, or a coterie of beta orbiters sucking up to her on a regular basis, every girl Jack dated was a full-on attention junkie.

And not a single one thought what they were doing was wrong.

Jack didn’t merely peer into his girlfriends’ private messages, he confronted them about the other men they were hiding from him. All of them behaved identically: lying and spinning frantically in an attempt to maintain their facade of wholesomeness. When Jack threatened to leave them, however, they all broke down crying and pleading for him to reconsider:

She started pleading as I walked away. Grabbing my arm and trying to get me to talk to her. She was crying and screaming and making a scene.

She wouldn’t let me go back to my place without taking her along as well. She clung to my side. I looked at her again, finally seeing her for who she was. I was still angry.

While Jack is angry and hurt during his earlier confrontations, as the book wears on he becomes increasingly cynical about his relationships. At the end, he deletes the key logger because he knows exactly what to expect from the girls he meets.

He’s also accepted their nature and doesn’t fault them for what they do.

That’s part of The Key Logger’s effectiveness as a work: it teaches that what girls are doing is completely rational. Girls aren’t simply attention junkies, they’re affirmation addicts. Their self-esteem is so poor, their souls so empty that they can’t go any length of time without having a man tell them how smart or beautiful they are. That’s what I mean when I say that girls will die without attention from men; even fish/bicycle feminists need constant affirmations from manboobs like John Scalzi in order to keep from OD’ing on Klonopin.

Can you really begrudge them for slaking this addiction, especially when no one tells them what they’re doing is wrong?

I forget who it was that said that men are romantics and women are realists when it comes to love, but The Key Logger drives that home. How many guys have this kind of support network in place? How many men who are in a relationship have a girl on the side they can call up for a deep dicking if their girlfriend/wife shows them the door? Almost none. The average man is conditioned to hang all his hopes on one girl, to the point where chodes will abandon their guy friends when they get a girlfriend, leaving them with nothing to fall back on when the relationship implodes. Meanwhile, the girl they think is the love of their life maintains her emotional safety net with obsessive-compulsive detail, so the minute her relationship goes south, she has her pick of suitors and court eunuchs to remind her what a catch she is.

And people thought the Captain Power was exaggerating when he said that all girls will have sex with another guy within 24 hours of breaking up with you.

The more cynical in the audience will probably go, “So fucking what? We knew all this already!” No, you didn’t. You know about it in the abstract, through manosphere blog posts and secondhand stories, but few men have been confronted with the average girl’s emotional calculus in such a stark manner. I’ve been confronted with it in the past, and it’s disturbing, near sociopathic how girls can effortlessly justify their emotional promiscuity. Appealing to morality is a waste of time; you might as well be speaking in a foreign language.

It comes down to this: if you let them, all girls will become sluts.

Not necessarily physical sluts, but emotional sluts, seeking masculine attention like a crackhead financing his addiction by holding up gas stations. Reading a book like The Key Logger, you almost start to understand why Islamic countries like Saudi Arabia enforce severe restrictions on women through Sharia law (note for the slow: that is not an endorsement of Sharia): it’s about controlling womens’ addiction to attention. When you force women to wear burqas every time they leave the house and restrict their interactions with men other than their husbands, you’re eliminating the means by which women become addiction junkies, theoretically preserving marriages and families.

And make no mistake, I’ve watched relationships and even a marriage collapse because American girls just can’t get their affirmation addiction under control.

Where I would dissent from Jack is that I don’t believe girls’ addiction to attention is entirely hardwired. Yes, girls are inclined to attention whore, but just as a culture can tamp down this tendency (as in the aforementioned case of Saudi Arabia), it can also feed it. Modern American and Western culture encourages female attention-seeking and artificially shores up girls’ self-esteem, making them think they’re morally superior just for having a vagina. Is it any wonder why girls go berserk when we in the manosphere puncture feminist lies? We’re threatening to cut off their drug supply!

Girls are behaving rationally in putting their best interests first, no different than us.

This is why The Key Logger is a necessary and remarkable book. If you’re still harboring beta fantasies of happily ever after, Jack’s book will help you shatter them. While there’s no practical advice in the book, internalizing its lessons and message will help you build the mindset you need to deal with girls in our modern world. And even if you’re a seasoned player, The Key Logger is a fascinating look into female psychology, one not found anywhere else in the manosphere.

Just remember: don’t be bitter.

Don’t get mad, get even. Forget your guilt about keeping a harem or having girls on the side. In the quest for sexual antifragility, we men have a long ways to catch up.

Click here to buy The Key Logger: A Forbidden Glimpse Into the True Nature of Women.

Read Next: The Perfect Conversation: Win Any Girl with Words by Nicholas Jack

Breakfast with the Dirt Cult by Samuel Finlay

Breakfast with the Dirt Cult is a roman a clef about author Samuel Finlay’s stint serving in Afghanistan nearly a decade ago, intertwined with a relationship he had with a bibliophilic stripper he met in Montreal just prior to deploying. It’s a delightful black miasma of lust, violence and death, interspaced with Finlay’s own growing realization that everything he believes about America, women and life itself is a bleeding lie.

Were it not for Finlay’s stylistic schizophrenia, Breakfast with the Dirt Cult would be a incredible book; instead, it’s merely a great one.

Appropriately enough, the book begins in Montreal with Tom Walton, Finlay’s literary surrogate, on leave from basic training at Fort Drum. (As an aside, I’d never thought I’d ever see a fellow manospherian reference Fort Drum—or anywhere in upstate New York for that matter—in their writing. I know the place too well: it’s in Watertown, about an hour north of Syracuse, and when my dad was in the military we often found ourselves up there.) The book stumbles almost immediately as Finlay’s experiences run up against his sentimental prose:

Amy’s lithe young body was not that of the hot girl who takes her clothes off for money. It belonged instead to the girl who you wished lived next door, who in her heathen innocence had the decency to make sure the windows were always good and open when she was changing her clothes. The Lord God A’mighty had hand-crafted her out of a bunch of sleek feminine curves all living together in perfect harmony. She looked soft; Walton figured she was soft in ways he’d never heard of. It even extended to her smile, or maybe all the rest came from there in the first place. It emanated a spritely, joyously pagan quality.

Everything about Walton and Amy’s relationship smacks of falseness thanks to the borderline-treacly writing. Beyond the fact that she comes off more like a hooker-with-a-heart-of-gold cliche than an actual girl, it’s a jarring shift from the military chapters, which are gloriously written. Finlay depicts army life in all its iniquities and tribulations, with hilarious anecdotes from his comrades and commanding officers:

“… So we’ve established that goddamn sexual harassment isn’t tolerated by the Army,” Sergeant Sparn explained from the front of the dayroom. All of the enlisted personnel of Alpha Company sat in attendance. “But let me ask you a question. Who here likes it when the girl goes down on you? Come on, raise your hands.

“WELL, YOU’RE FUCKING WRONG! That is considered sodomy and is punishable under the United States Code of Military Justice!

“What about fuckin’ a chick in the ass? You know, throwing it in the pudding?

“YOU’RE FUCKING WRONG, HERO! The Missionary Position is the only authorized position under UCMJ!”

Fortunately, after the first chapter, the narrative shifts back to Walton’s training at Fort Drum and his deployment to Afghanistan. Amy remains in the background as Walton’s pen-pal, sending him care packages of books every so often. The army sections of Dirt Cult rest in a Célinean/Bukowskian vein, as Walton and his comrades witness the absurdity of American foreign policy first-hand; I virtually inhaled them in about an hour. The only problem is that Walton will occasionally break voice to go on a annoying missive, such as this anti-feminist tirade inspired by an outing to a Watertown nightclub:

Even medicine had been weaponized. People donated proudly for the cure of breast or ovarian cancer, but few gave a damn about men with tumors in their testicles or prostates. The same was true of parenthood. A girl wanting to “have it all” by being a single mom could seek to adopt, get knocked up, or go the spermcicle route and be considered a champion of progress. (Because she “didn’t need a man.” The Celebrity-Industrial Complex had told her so! Except of course, for her Uncle Sam. She also needed someone watch her child while she was busy focusing on her career. That, and it was nice to have a man around to lift heavy objects. And to perform household maintenance. And to deal with burglars and potential rapists. And to understand that in the event of an emergency, he was to forfeit his life for her and her offspring, because chivalry had died for some reason.)

Dirt Cult’s story takes a dramatic twist midway through, as the action heats up in Walton’s little slice of hell. Unfortunately, it also means he reunites with Amy and the novel’s quality drops off again. Personally, I have difficulty reconciling both parts of the story. In the army chapters, Walton is a tough-talking and solid, if somewhat naive grunt; in the Amy chapters, he devolves into a lovesick chump. Fortunately, as both his relationship and his military career draw to a close, the action heats up again and the book draws to a shocking and chilling close. You just have to wade through boners like this to get there:

“I can respect that. Kinda makes me think of Texas. We Oklahomans are sworn to a Red River blood feud with the Lone Star State as a matter of principle, but I admire the hell out of Texas’s proud tradition of tellin’ the rest of the country, ‘Fuck y’all!’ You know, I never really cared much for French, but after Montreal, I found I kind of liked it. I think when I get out I might have to visit Paris. It’d be all Moulin Rouge ‘n shit.”

Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, WRONG. I occasionally hear this line from keyboard jockeys in the ‘sphere and I want to kill it right now.

Quebec is basically West Virginia crossed with Vegas.

There’s nothing “sophisticated” or “cultured” about the place; historically, all the smart French left Canada at the end of the French and Indian War, leaving a land full of inbred idiots and classless slags whose only concern in life is popping out a kid, never mind actually getting married or even having a relationship with the father (Quebec’s marriage and fertility rates are not only the lowest in Canada, but lower than all of the states in the U.S.). Montreal is still dominated by organized crime, and were it not for equalization payments, the provincial government would have had to declare bankruptcy decades ago. Even the French that they speak is half-unintelligible, full of English loanwords and anachronistic structures that have been eliminated from standard French. Quebecois girls have a leg up on American girls because they’re not fat and because of the exoticism factor, but that’s it.

Comparing Montreal to Paris is like comparing Shreveport to London.

This isn’t an attack, by the way; Montreal is one of my favorite cities. But I’m not going to pretend that it’s something that it isn’t. I’ll assume that Finlay’s narrator is speaking from inexperience, but this combined with the overall saccharine writing about Amy really chafed my nuts.

That said, I still highly recommend Breakfast with the Dirt Cult. As a coming-of-age story, a young man’s awakening to the reality of the world, it’s not only (mostly) well-written but unique. When Finlay is at his best, he captures the Slaughterhouse Five-level lunacy of modern America and the unease he had of living through it. Also, given that this is his first book, I can forgive mistakes that much more easily.

I can’t wait to see what Finlay comes up with next.

Click here to buy Breakfast with the Dirt Cult.

Read Next: Casual Encounters: A Brief Guide to Hooking Up on Craigslist by Dirt Man

Ecclesiastes by Anonymous

It’s funny: for a guy who went to a Catholic school, I really don’t remember much about the Bible. We had religion classes once a day during my entire tenure there, but I never cottoned to my school’s limp-wristed, social justice interpretation of Christianity, and I doubt anyone else in my class did either. It was like an unwritten agreement between the students and the school: we’d pretend to take the God stuff seriously, and in exchange we’d get a diploma from a high school that would impress every employer within a 90-mile radius. The only part of the Bible I ever liked was the Song of Songs.

So I took a greater than normal amount of pleasure from reading Ecclesiastes.

One of the newest releases from OVO impresario Trevor Blake, an e-book version of a book from the Bible seems an odd thing for an ardent atheist to release, at least if you know nothing about Ecclesiastes. One of the most celebrated books of the Bible, Ecclesiastes is a meditation on the nature of our world, its trials and tribulations, and the daily grind that human beings go through to survive. As one of the most interesting chapters of arguably the most influential book in human history, Ecclesiastes is a worthy buy.

What makes this edition of Ecclesiastes a good purchase is the convenient features Trevor has built into it. Ecclesiastes includes both Spanish and German translations (from the 1569 Antigua Sagradas Escrituras Version and the 1534 Luther Bible, respectively; the English version is from the 1611 King James Bible), giving you added value for your money. Additionally, Trevor has made this an interlinear volume by including links to the other translations beside each verse, letting you jump between the different versions at will. For example, here’s a verse from the English version:

[ES][EN][DE] 1:6 The wind goeth toward the south, and turneth about unto the north; it whirleth about continually, and the wind returneth again according to his circuits.

The “[ES]” and “[DE]” link to the Spanish and German versions of Ecclesiastes 1:6, respectively, making this edition of Ecclesiastes a great buy for the multilingual. Trevor’s use of the King James Bible edition for the English version was also a smart move, as its Shakespearian style will appeal to those who are unfamiliar with the Bible.

But more than that, Ecclesiastes is one of the classic philosophical texts of Western civilization for a reason.

Ecclesiastes is narrated by Koheleth, introduced as one of the kings of Jerusalem, and the book purports to be his wisdom on life. Koheleth expounds that human affairs are inherently unreliable, with death and time working to unmake everything that men create. Ultimately, the only thing we can do is enjoy life while we still have it:

10:12 The words of a wise man’s mouth are gracious; but the lips of a fool will swallow up himself.

10:13 The beginning of the words of his mouth is foolishness: and the end of his talk is mischievous madness.

10:14 A fool also is full of words: a man cannot tell what shall be; and what shall be after him, who can tell him?

Returning to the Bible after nearly a decade out of high school, what struck me about Ecclesiastes was how un-Christian it reads, or at the very least how un-Christian it sounds compared to mainstream Christianity. Indeed, in Koheleth’s conception of the world, God barely figures at all, except as an authority figure beyond death’s grip, something that is ultimately unknowable. Ecclesiastes is focused on the here and now, on making the most of the moment before death comes to claim us all.

Not only that, even by Biblical standards, Ecclesiastes is unusually pessimistic, even misanthropic.

Koheleth is consistently doubtful of humanity’s ability to learn from its mistakes. No one ultimately knows the end goal of wisdom and what is best for men, and anyone who does claim to know is arrogant beyond belief and dangerous. Do you really need me to point out the relevance of this assertion? Look around us; the people who claim to know what’s best for humanity are the ones driving it to extinction. Presidents launching pointless wars; communists forcibly redistributing crops at gunpoint; social justice warriors who think children as young as five should be allowed to get sex change operations; the list goes on.

If my teachers had pointed me to Ecclesiastes, I probably would have paid more attention in class.

I have two problems with Trevor’s edition of Ecclesiastes, both relatively minor. The first is that like with his compilation of Raoul Vaneigem’s works, he fails to include an introduction of any kind. While this isn’t as big a deal considering that there’s plenty of scholarship on the Bible already, it makes the book seem somewhat incomplete. Additionally, for some reason, the Spanish-language volume comes before the English version, despite the fact that the primary audience of Ecclesiastes is native English speakers. Again, it’s not a big deal considering you can just skip to the English version using the Table of Contents, but it seems odd.

Aside from these two dings, Ecclesiastes is a great buy. If you’re not familiar with the Bible, you need to read it so you can better understand Western philosophy and thought. If you are familiar with the Bible, Trevor’s take on Ecclesiastes makes for a nice addition to your collection.

Click here to buy Ecclesiastes.

Read Next: The Evolutionary Psychology Behind Politics by Anonymous Conservative

From Da to Yes: Understanding the East Europeans by Yale Richmond

What do you call a book that’s laced with copious amounts of bullshit but is still worth reading?

From Da to Yes, as its name implies, is a guide to the nations of eastern Europe excluding Russia, which is covered in Yale Richmond’s companion book From Nyet to Da. Richmond himself, so far as I can tell, is one of those weedy little neoliberal twerps who went to eastern Europe in the nineties to facilitate in the region’s “democratic” and “capitalist” transitions (read: help Westerners steal everything that wasn’t nailed down). Indeed, the book is dedicated to the Americans “who are giving so generously of their time to assist in the democratic transition in eastern Europe.”

We’re in for some rough sledding, folks.

Still, From Da to Yes is an interesting and informative cultural guidebook, provided you can read between the lines and decipher Richmond’s squid-like prose. He’s clearly an academic, as evidenced by his clinical, dry writing style and unwillingness to make any kind of judgment about the peoples he’s writing about. For example, here’s a section from one of the first chapters, on Poland:

Poles have two codes of behavior, one public and the other private. In public, they can be pushy, demanding, distant, abrupt, and rude. In private, they are warm, generous, hospitable, and loquacious. Conversations are lengthy, and goodbyes never seem to end. As the Poles say, “The English leave without saying goodbye. The Poles say goodbye but do not leave.”

Read: the Poles are a bunch of blabbermouths.

Or check this section from the chapter on the Czechs and Slovaks:

Poles, as we have seen, were always prepared to rise up and fight for their independence and freedom. Czechs have consistently chosen a more cautious course and, they might argue, with similar results.

Read: the Czechs are a bunch of shameless suckups. Mark Ames made the exact same claims in The Exile, only he didn’t pussyfoot around the facts.

Still, From Da to Yes is nothing if not comprehensive. The book is short on practical information for tourists such as cost of living and sights to see, so don’t buy it if you’re looking for a Lonely Planet substitute (though given that the book was published in 1995, it wouldn’t be useful for that purpose anymore anyway). Richmond is squarely focused on describing the cultural and historical attributes of the Poles, Hungarians, Romanians and more. Additionally, if you’re of eastern European descent and interested in tracing your ancestry, the book has an interesting appendix full of resources and advice.

You just need to wade through a lot of pointlessness to get there.

As I mentioned already, Richmond’s academic perspective prevents him from calling bullshit where appropriate. Many of the chapters drag on due to him repeating information that was already pretty well-stated in the introduction. For example, he keeps making a point to delineate each culture’s hospitality to outsiders, oblivious to the fact that it’s virtually identical from country to country. Additionally, Richmond lacks the balls to just admit that a lot of peoples in eastern Europe, such as the Macedonians and Moldovans, simply aren’t that noteworthy.

Contrast to Roosh’s Bang Poland, where he flat-out says in the intro that Polish culture is pretty boring and uninteresting, a product of the country being sandwiched between Germany and Russia, two great powers.

This would be somewhat forgivable if From Da to Yes applied the same level of detail to all of the cultures it discusses, but it doesn’t. The section on Belarus is embarrassingly skimpy, for example, and all the nations of Yugoslavia are cramped into a single chapter. Additionally, Richmond spends an odd amount of time on information that should merit a footnote at best. For example, he spends multiple paragraphs discussing how each nationality treated Jews in World War II.

What saves From Da to Yes is its historical information. Richmond gives you a bird’s eye look at the pasts of Poland, Albania, Bulgaria and more, useful if you’re a history buff or looking to augment your knowledge if you’re planning to make a trip to the country in question. If you keep your BS detector on, From Da to Yes is a solid resource if you’re interested in and/or traveling to eastern Europe and want to know what to expect.

Click here to buy From Da to Yes: Understanding the East Europeans.

Read Next: Bang Poland: How to Make Love to Polish Women in Poland by Roosh V

Captain Capitalism: Top Shelf by Aaron Clarey

As I’ve written before, a book consisting solely of articles you’ve already published on your blog is a tough sell. Since the book’s content is already online for free, you will get considerably fewer takers than a book full of original content. Additionally, because essay collections lack narrative coherence, there’s less motivation to read through them then with a regular book.

Even still, if you’re a long-time blogger, it’s worth putting your best posts into paperback format.

Captain Capitalism: Top Shelf is the first in a promised series of best-of collections from Aaron Clarey, he of Enjoy the Decline and Worthless. And at over four hundred pages, you’re definitely getting your money’s worth with this book. Despite its glaring and frankly avoidable flaws, I recommend Top Shelf as an entertaining and informative collection of Clarey’s work.

Like with other essay collections, the top two reasons to buy Top Shelf are convenience and permanency. Like Roosh, Clarey has been blogging for close to a decade and has written thousands of articles in that time. Searching through them will take you hours, if not days. If you’ve got infinite amounts of free time to burn, then yeah, maybe you should pass on this book. For the rest of us though, we have real lives and things to do:

My boss explained to me that we are here to challenge the students, but not too much. That my test was unfair and I should consider tailoring it more to their skill level. Of course with hindsight I now see what the charlatan of a dean was telling me; “Dumb it down because we’re fleecing these kids for their money for a worthless degree and if you rock the boat we’ll lose some of them.” But he couldn’t come outright and say that, ergo why he was feeding me a line of bull.

Additionally, as Clarey himself points out in the introduction, Top Shelf is worth owning just because. Websites are a lot more fragile than you think, and years of sweat and labor can be blinked out of existence in an eye. Having a collection of Clarey’s (or Roosh’s, or my own) best work ensures that you won’t be left in the lurch should Google or the PC commissars descend upon our minimalist Minnesotan hero.

Despite Top Shelf’s length, Clarey’s conversational writing style and cheerful tone makes the book fly by smoothly. He broaches just about every topic you could think, though the bulk of the articles revolve around game, women and economics. The highlight of the book are Clarey’s personal stories, my favorite being “Degree Mills,” about his time teaching at a for-profit outhouse of a college, and “The Goldman Sachs Story,” about his interview for a job with the vampire squid itself:

So, after 1 hour of summarily defeating the best U of Penn Clarion had to offer (and getting some odd looks that nobody could recognize me or remember me), I hit the showers (which was my original purpose in the first place) cleaned up, hopped back into the Gutless Cutlass and headed out.

My problems with Top Shelf are two. One, the organization is slipshod and incomprehensible. Clarey seemingly throws articles at you with no concern for what the subject matter is or how it relates to what you just read. You’ll finish reading an article about the joys of bachelorhood and the one following it will be about saving for retirement, with absolutely nothing to connect the two. It would have been far better to organize the book into thematic chapters instead.

Secondly, the editing in the book is awful.

Clarey states in the introduction that he deliberately avoided cleaning up the posts in order to “remain true” to the original work, but the problem is that on a technical level, Aaron Clarey is not a good writer. His prose is full of typos, malaprops, punctuation mistakes, grammar errors and just about every mistake a writer could make. It’s a testament to his talent as a storyteller and his knowledge as a man that the book remains not only readable but enjoyable.

Look Aaron, I get it. You think English is a useless subject to major in. So do I, and I actually studied it. You also hate copyediting. So do I. That’s why we have Elance, a website where you can hire someone to fix all the typos for you, with absolutely no effort or work required on your part. It’s not free, but the extra step ensures that your product looks more professional.

Finally, this is unrelated to the book’s quality, but for some reason, the Kindle and paperback editions of Top Shelf are not linked on Amazon (i.e. you can’t go to the Kindle version from the paperback version’s page and vice versa). This wouldn’t bother me if it weren’t for the fact that at least once a month, Clarey complains about people emailing him asking whether there’s a Kindle version (only the paperback version is linked from his blog). I’ve tried explaining to him how he can fix this (as I’ve had this problem myself in the past), but here it is again, because he clearly didn’t listen to me the first couple of times:

  1. Go to your KDP dashboard.
  2. Select “Contact Us” in the lower-right corner.
  3. Select “Product Page.”
  4. Fill out the form telling Amazon that you want the Kindle and paperback versions of Top Shelf linked.

And there you go, Aaron. Amazon will do it for you automatically. Thirty seconds of work on your part will save you from being besieged with people asking you “Is there a Kindle version of Top Shelf? Is there? IS THERE?”

Despite all these issues, Captain Capitalism: Top Shelf is a worthy book and a must-own if you’re a fan of Aaron’s writings.

Click here to buy Captain Capitalism: Top Shelf for Kindle. Click here for the paperback edition.

Read Next: Worthless: The Young Person’s Indispensable Guide to Choosing the Right Major by Aaron Clarey

The Yiddish Policemen’s Union by Michael Chabon

Alternate history, like sci-fi and fantasy, is one of those genres that is nearly unreadable due to its infestation with goons and dorks. Much in the same way that science fiction and fantasy novels are larded up with extraneous detail about the world the story takes place in, alternate history writers are obsessed with vomiting out useless information about their books’ settings, destroying any possibility of character development or an interesting plot. Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle is about the only enjoyable alternate history novel I’ve ever read, mainly because its setting—a world in which the Nazis won World War II—is believable and it doesn’t drown you in an avalanche of superfluous information.

With The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, I can add another book to that list.

The only reason I bought this book—or even heard of it—was because I’m a huge fan of the Coen brothers and had read that they were planning to do a film adaptation. After reading it, I can definitely understand why the Coens were attracted to it: The Yiddish Policemen’s Union is an enthralling blend of hardboiled crime novels, dry humor and history. While at times it’s more pastiche than original, it comes together to create a story more than the sum of its parts.

The premise of Policemen’s Union begins with the Slattery Report. In 1940, Interior Undersecretary Henry Slattery recommended that the U.S. allow Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany to settle in Alaska, which would serve the dual purpose of getting the Jews out of harm’s way while developing Alaska’s vast natural resources. Despite support from other members of Roosevelt’s cabinet, the plan was killed before it could be brought to a vote before Congress. In Michael Chabon’s story, however, the untimely death of Alaska Territory delegate Anthony Dimond results in the Slattery Report being passed into law:

Not quite two years later, Hertz Shemets, his mother, and his kid sister, Freydl, arrived on Baranof Island, Alaska, with the first wave of Galitzer settlers. He came on the notorious Diamond, a World War I– era troop transport that Secretary Ickes ordered taken out of mothballs and rechristened as a left-handed memorial, or so legend has it, to the late Anthony Dimond, the Alaska Territory’s nonvoting delegate to the House of Representatives. (Until the fatal intervention on a Washington, D.C., street corner of a drunken, taxi-driving schlemiel named Denny Lanning—eternal hero of the Sitka Jews—Delegate Dimond had been on the verge of getting the Alaskan Settlement Act killed in committee.) Thin, pale, bewildered, Hertz Shemets stepped from the Diamond, from the dark and the reek of soup and rusty puddles, to the clean cold spice of Sitka pine. With his family and his people he was numbered, inoculated, deloused, tagged like a migrant bird by the stipulations of the Alaskan Settlement Act of 1940. In a cardboard pocketbook he carried an “Ickes passport,” a special emergency visa printed on special flimsy paper with special smeary ink.

As a result, only a fraction of Europe’s Jews are killed in the Holocaust, and while Zionists do succeed in setting up an independent Israel in 1948, it is conquered and wiped out mere months later due to a lack of manpower to fight the surrounding Arab states. Policemen’s Union is set sixty years after World War II in Sitka, which has become a massive, sprawling metropolis on the brink of extermination. It’s the eve of Reversion, when Alaska will return to gentile control, meaning all the Jews will have to emigrate.

The beautiful thing about Chabon’s premise is that this is where he leaves it. While he mentions other aspects of history in passing, he doesn’t belabor the novel’s backstory, instead depicting the lives of Sitka’s Jewish residents though subtlety and omission. The defining theme of Policemen’s Union is alienation, a common trope in Jewish literature but explored here in a way that is original and refreshing. Sitka’s residents primarily speak Yiddish, cutting them off not only from gentiles but from their fellow American Jews; they are restricted from traveling to other parts of the U.S.; their society is anachronistic, preserving aspects of European Jewish culture long after the rest of the world has moved on:

“I’m willing to venture that on occasion he played chess,” Landsman says. One of the three books in the room is a creased and broken-backed paperback edition of Three Hundred Chess Games by Siegbert Tarrasch. It has a manila pocket pasted to its inside back cover, with a return card that shows it was last borrowed from the central branch of the Sitka Public Library in July 1986. Landsman can’t help thinking that he first made love to his future ex-wife in July 1986. Bina was twenty at the time, and Landsman was twenty-three, and it was the height of the northern summer. July 1986 is the date stamped onto the card in the pocket of Landsman’s illusions. The other two books are cheap Yiddish thrillers. “Beyond that I know goat shit.”

The novel’s protagonist is Meyer Landsman, an alcoholic, divorced, middle-aged homicide detective assigned to investigate the murder of Mendel Shpilman, believed by many of Sitka’s residents to be the messiah. Landsman’s sad-sack yet determined personality calls to mind Rick Deckard in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?; he is consistently bossed around by his superior and ex-wife Bina and relies on his partner, the half-Indian Berko Shemets, to pull his feet out of the fire every time he gets in a jam. Much of the novel’s comedy comes from Landsman’s Sam Spade fantasies constantly colliding with reality:

“Who said anything about needing?” Landsman says, fumbling with the button fly of some worn twill trousers. Cotton work shirt, laceless canvas sneaks. They want to dress him like a wino, or a beach bum, or some other kind of loser who turns up naked at your intake desk, homeless, no visible means of support. The shoes are too big, but otherwise, everything’s a perfect fit.

The other clever aspect of Policemen’s Union comes from Chabon’s use of Yiddish. He claims his inspiration for the novel came from an old translation guide he found in a bookstore called Say it in Yiddish; his dialogue is peppered with various Yiddish phrases both authentic and original, giving the book a flavor all its own. For example, snitches are known as “shtinkers,” while hitmen are referred to as “shlossers” (literally “mechanic”).

While the main plot of Policemen’s Union follows a somewhat predictable path for detective novels, the story remains engrossing due to Chabon’s tight dialogue and the book’s unique setting. Chabon’s prose is economical and only dives into repetitious overwriting on a couple of occasions. Additionally, the plot ties into contemporary American culture in a pretty creative way. I won’t spoil it, other than to say that if you know how Jewish and Christian relations work in the U.S., it won’t surprise you much at all.

I would love to see what the Coen brothers make of this book.

My one complaint with Policemen’s Union, or at least with the Kindle edition, is the way the book’s glossary is organized. Chabon helpfully provides an index of all the Yiddish slang used in the novel, but the Kindle version lacks hyperlinks to it, meaning you need to stop reading and manually flip over to the glossary every time you come across a new word. It’s not a huge deal, but it’s a little annoying. The book would have been improved had Chabon used footnotes instead.

Otherwise, if you enjoy detective fiction and alternate history, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union is a great entry for both genres and is absolutely worth your time.

Click here to buy The Yiddish Policemen’s Union.

Read Next: Another Day in Paradise by Eddie Little

Irreversible: You Can’t Go Home Again

I watched Irreversible a couple weeks back on Zampano’s recommendation, and I wasn’t really impressed with it the first time around. If you’ve heard of the movie, you probably know it for its climactic scene, where Monica Bellucci gets graphically raped in a Parisian pedestrian tunnel. A couple feminists claimed to have been triggered by my using a still from the movie as an image for my podcast interview with Zampano, which the two of us found amusing; I only picked the still because it’s the image that Zampano uses for his Gravatar and Twitter account.

Honestly, call me heartless or sociopathic, but the rape scene in Irreversible really didn’t move me all that much.

Part of the overreaction to Irreversible is in part due to feminists brainwashing everyone in believing that rape is the WORST! THING! EVER!, creating a Pavlovian response where people automatically describe rape as “brutal” or “sickening” regardless of the facts of the matter, like devout Christians going into apoplectic rage when they’re confronted with “sin.” See: Lee Stranahan getting raked over the coals for suggesting that the Steubenville rape wasn’t “brutal.”

The other problem is that objectively, Irreversible doesn’t give the audience any reason to care about what happens to Bellucci’s character. The film’s big schtick is that the scenes are played in reverse order, so all the crucial character development isn’t shown until after we’ve seen the rape. Not only that, director Gaspar Noé absolutely drowns the audience in graphic violence for the first half of the film, to the point where it gets boring. By the time Bellucci’s character gets raped, we’ve not only seen what she looks like afterwards, but we’ve also watched a man get his arm broken by a gay rapist, another man get his skull smashed in with a fire extinguisher, a tranny hooker get brutalized at knifepoint, a cab driver get beaten and maced, and more. I found the rape scene in Blue Velvet to be far more disturbing, mainly because that movie actually gives us a reason to care about its characters.

Also interesting that in both movies, the character who gets raped is played by an Italian model better known for her looks than her acting chops.

It doesn’t help that Irreversible’s story is on the level of I Spit on Your Grave. It’s about a woman named Alex (Bellucci) who gets raped and her boyfriend (Vincent Cassel) and his friend’s (Albert Dupontel) attempt to get revenge on her assailant. Really. That’s as deep as it gets. Showing the film’s scenes in reverse chronological order allows for some interesting developments (such as the revelation that Marcel and Pierre end up killing the wrong guy), but as I mentioned already, throwing all the character development at the end makes it impossible to get emotionally invested in the story. In fact, I was so bored by the end that not even a naked Monica Bellucci could keep me from falling asleep.

On the surface, Irreversible seemed like another one of those poorly written “art films” that SWPLs gush over.

When I commented to this effect on Twitter, Chip Smith pointed me to Michael Blowhard’s (Ray Sawhill’s) thoughts on the movie. Sawhill sees the movie as a metaphor for the decline of France, and to a lesser extent Europe and the West in general, making its point through subtleties in presentation and tone rather than beating you over the head with it. With this in mind, I decided to give Irreversible another shot, and found a lot of merit in Sawhill’s analysis.

I don’t know if I’d ever call Irreversible a good movie, but it’s worth watching at least once.

The biggest things that stood out to me on my second viewing was the cinematography and camerawork. One of the reasons why I disliked the film the first time around was because Noé swings the camera around like an autistic kindergartener bombed on Red Bull, never focusing on any one thing for more than a brief moment. This is particularly evident during the scene in the gay BDSM club Rectum, which flashes a different vision of depravity on screen every other second. Combined with the already bleak, dark underground settings of Irreversible’s first half and Noé’s love of low-angle shots, it’s difficult to keep a bead on the action.

Thing is, this doesn’t hold true for the second half, which follows Marcel and Alex’s happy life before the rape. While the camera still switches views frequently, its movement is no longer herky-jerky but smooth and natural, often going above to give us a bird’s eye view of the scene. Indeed, the final scene shows us Bellucci reading a book from overhead. Additionally, the settings of these scenes are colorful and full of life; a posh party, a nice part of the metro, Marcel and Alex’s cheery apartment and the like.

The rape scene is a neat divider between these two styles, as it’s the only part of the movie where the camera is stationary for any length of time.

The other aspect of Irreversible that popped out at me was the contrast between Marcel and Alex’s relationship and the mindless hedonism of the gays at Rectum. The obvious difference between the reproductive nature of normal sex (indeed, we learn near the end of the film that Alex was pregnant) and the sterile nature of gay sex is important, but Noé throws in more red meat for the audience to snack on. One of the early scenes (chronologically) has Marcel, Alex and Pierre talking about orgasming and how couples have a responsibility to pleasure each other; this stands in comparison to the selfish orgies at Rectum, whose depraved patrons see each other purely as a means to get off.

Indeed, the gay characters in Irreversible are its villains, used as a metaphor for soulless self-gratification and psychopathy. Alex is violently sodomized by a gay man for no other reason than because he can get away with it. Another homo tries to do the same thing to Marcel, again for no other reason than because he can.

Not only do the gays lack any concern for straights, they have no loyalty to each other. During the scene in which Pierre beats the homo to death at Rectum, none of the man’s compadres lift a finger to help him, even though they outnumber Pierre thirty to one. Hell, afterwards they joke about how the guy’s face got “fucked up.” Contrast this with Marcel and Pierre’s friendship; Pierre sticks by his friend even as he becomes increasingly irrational and “blood simple,” as Hammett might put it. Indeed, Pierre tried to dissuade Marcel from entering Rectum, yet still rides to his rescue when he gets in a jam.

Not only that, we learn that Pierre had been dating Alex before Marcel “stole” her away, yet Pierre still stands by him.

The commentary is fairly obvious: Noé is making a point about the atomization of French and Western society. Marcel, Alex and Pierre represent the France of old, the France of community, love and belonging; their ruination at the hands of the Rectum gays represents the unmaking of traditional society by hedonism and leftism. There are other subtle clues hinting at this message; for example, the final (chronologically first) scene shows Monica Bellucci reading while accompanied by Beethoven’s 7th Symphony, while the first (chronologically last) scene features obnoxious, degenerate electronic music of the kind you need to be on MDMA to tolerate.

Not only that, Irreversible makes the depressing point that there’s no going back.

The film opens and closes with the same quote, “time destroys everything.” Marcel and Pierre’s sojourn in vigilantism is a complete failure. Not only do they end up murdering the wrong man, Marcel’s arm is broken and Pierre is looking at life in prison. It’s also subtly hinted that Alex might not recover from her injuries. Her rapist will continue to walk free.

Their idyllic lives are gone forever.

Like I said, I don’t know if all this symbolism makes Irreversible a good movie. It’s still a film with a B-movie plot, gratuitous violence and so-so acting. But it’s worth watching to decide for yourself.

Click here to watch Irreversible.

Read Next: 9 Songs: Jerking Off to Jerks

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

NOTE: This article was originally published at In Mala Fide on April 21, 2012. I’m re-posting it here as the site is now defunct.

Black Passenger Yellow Cabs is one of those books where a low price point enables me to look past its numerous flaws. And believe you me, this is an incredibly flawed book. But it only cost me $2.99 (the lowest price you can charge for a Kindle book and still make any money), so these flaws aren’t as huge a deal as they would normally be.

Black Passenger is a reasonably unique book: half tell-all memoir, half sociological study. It chronicles author Stefhen Bryan’s adventures teaching English in Japan, banging a slew of girls along the way, to the point where he gets sick of it and finally gets married. Interspersed between his tales of hedonism, he delves into his abusive childhood growing up in Jamaica, his self-destructive and suicidal behavior in his adopted homeland of America, and his extensive research into the pathologies of Japanese society:

Which begs the question, why do the Japanese work themselves to the grave, or more accurately, to the crematorium? The answer lies in their socialization. Whereas organisms, especially humans and especially Western humans seek to maximize pleasure and minimize pain, the Japanese from thousands of years of programming seek to do the opposite, cultural tendencies on which businesses and political leaders capitalize.

Bryan amusingly compares Japan to the Jackson family, its leaders a bunch of slave-driving nuts who were determined to make Japan into a first-world country no matter the cost. This aggressive Westernization meshed with Japan’s preexisting infantilized culture to create a shocking number of social problems, from mother-son incest to parricide to abnormally high rates of autism and Asperger’s (salarymen openly picking their noses and eating their snot is apparently a common sight on the subway). If you know any nerdy anime freaks or other Asian supremacists, this book would go a long way towards defusing their delusions about their beloved model minorities.

But I haven’t even gotten to the most bizarre problem Japan suffers from: the men there simply aren’t interested in sex. We all know about herbivore men and how the land of the rising sun leads the world in sexless marriages, but that’s not the worst of it. Many Japanese husbands are so uninterested in fucking their wives that they basically outsource the job to foreign men, which Bryan was all too eager to take advantage of:

Returning to her multi-car warehouse, we continued our consumption of each other’s lips, when the shutter descended far enough so our actions could not be recognized. Mouth still locked, we hurriedly unbuckled each other’s jeans, like teenagers trying to get busy before being caught. Her jeans appeared to have been welded, form-fitted onto her curvy athletic body and after much effort I pried them and her panties from her and began curling her, 52 kilograms and 158 centimeters, onto my north pointing member. It had been five years for her, so my invasion was the source of great pain.

“I have to cook my husband’s dinner,” she said, as I curled her up and down.  “Already we’ve been gone too long.  Let’s meet next weekend again and go to a hotel.”

Reading Black Passenger went a long way towards making me understand why East Asia is a sexual paradise for white men: Japanese guys are the biggest pussies on the planet. They’d rather work themselves to death (literally, as karoshi, death from overwork, is an epidemic in Japan) then get laid. How can you blame their women for running into the arms of foreign devils? At least foreign guys want to have sex.

Bryan also lays into the numerous problems Japanese girls have: poor dental hygiene, shyness, and an odd unwillingness to use birth control. That last one isn’t as big a deal as you might think, though, as Japanese women have absolutely no reservations about getting those unwanted little shits sucked out at the nearby clinic; Bryan goes through over a dozen abortions during his time there:

Abortion in Japan is an industry, which like all industries here is run by men. According to the Health Labor and Welfare Ministry 289,127 abortions were performed in 2005, the lowest since compiling data began in 1955. This number represents a first for pregnancy terminations to fall bellow the 300,000 mark since 1955. However, experts agree that the actual number may even be three times that amount, given structural incentives for doctors to under-report. Abortion and contraceptives are not covered by insurance, hence doctors are at liberty to set the price. As most – including three for which I paid – are paid for in cash, doctors are able to manipulate the numbers in order to dodge taxes and what’s more, the penalty for total under-reporting is less than the cost of one abortion. Since my arrival here in 2001, there have been at least two reports of authorities finding illegally and improperly discarded fetuses in dumpsters near abortions clinics.

Bryan’s descriptions of his sexual conquests are interesting enough but fall short of leaving an impact. While his ability to come up with metaphors for his penis is legendary (“SCUD” and “hardened negritude” among them), his diction is too wordy and intellectual. This tone works for the sociological portions of the book, but it falls flat during the memoir parts. An honest, introspective work like this needs to pull the reader in and rub his face in the depravity of it all, but I always felt disconnected from the action.

That’s just one problem with Black Passenger. The other two major problems with the book, that would cripple it if it weren’t so cheap, are its length and poor editing. This book drags on twice as long as it needs to, as Bryan’s sexual encounters become increasingly repetitive and dull, and the narrative slowly grinds to a halt instead of coming to a proper conclusion. I suppose you could make an argument that the monotony of the second half drives home Bryan’s increasing weariness of Japanese women, but it was a struggle to get all the way to the end.

And the editing… my God is it terrible. I was shocked to see an editor listed on Black Passenger’s Amazon page, because everything about the book screams “first draft.” Comma splices, run-on sentences, typos and more dot the pages like zits on a weeaboo’s face. Not only that, the Kindle formatting is screwed up, with paragraphs spaced unevenly and a few lacking indents.

Finally, Bryan’s feminist beliefs get annoying after a while. Roosh already brought this up in his review, but Bryan’s kvetching about the Japanese patriarchy is on shaky factual ground and could have come out of a Feministe or Jezebel screed.

Still, the ludicrously low price point makes these flaws less of an issue. Even with its slipshod editing, Black Passenger Yellow Cabs is an intriguing little adventure. If you want to learn more about Japan or if you just want to read another book about sleazy sexcapades, this is worth a look.

Click here to buy Black Passenger Yellow Cabs: Of Exile and Excess in Japan.

Read Next: The Exile: Sex, Drugs, and Libel in the New Russia by Mark Ames and Matt Taibbi

Steel Toes by Eddie Little

I’m honestly starting to think that Eddie Little’s death was one of the great tragedies of modern American literature. You’ve read my praise for his debut novel Another Day in Paradise, a roman à clef about growing up as a streetwise tough in the seventies, but Steel Toes blows that story out of the water and into orbit.

If there was such a thing as “karma,” James Frey would die a thousand deaths for plagiarizing Little.

Steel Toes is easily one of the best novels of the 21st century so far. It takes the gut-punching prose and hustle of Another Day in Paradise and kicks it up several notches. Little doesn’t simply rehash his first novel, he expands upon his oeuvre, to the point where you’re left wondering what he’d be putting out if he were alive today. Fair warning though: if you haven’t read Paradise, a lot of what makes Steel Toes great will be lost on you.

The novel is a sequel to Another Day in Paradise, picking up where the ending left off. Following the death of his girlfriend Rosie, Bobbie Prine ends up on a botched job and overdoses on smack, landing himself in an Indiana prison, a nightmarish “gladiator school” of ass-rape, murder and racial animosity. Every dirty detail of Prine’s life behind bars is meted out in Little’s typical 100 mph prose:

“Tellin’ ya, boy, a calf is the ticket. Slap your pecker into its mouth and it thinks it’s mama’s tit, starts suckin’ and won’t stop until it gets a gallon. God ain’t made the woman yet that can suck a dick better than a new calf. Shit howdy, don’t got no fuckin’ teeth, just keep on gummin’ at your organ till you’re howlin’ at the sky.”

Bobbie’s penchant for getting into racial brawls lands him a one-way ticket to a supermax prison, which he evades through a last minute escape attempt with his buddies Phil, a cross-eyed peckerwood from near the Kentucky border, and Big George, one of the few blacks in prison he’s on speaking terms with. They flee across the border to a Chicago-area farm run by one of Bobbie’s old associates, and from there the plot spirals into Bobbie’s attempts to reintegrate into civilian life and feed his growing heroin addiction:

Before there’s time to wonder if the drugs are going to fuck this up I am responding to Michelle from all the way inside me. Picking her up and kicking the front door closed and carrying her into my bedroom and watching her undress, large breasts covered with small freckles, tiny waist and fuck-me hips. Kicking my way outta my jeans, coming together, not like enemy ships but like motherfuckin’ poetry in motion. Those brown, orange-amber, gold eyes locked on mine as we draw apart and come together, making something bigger and better than either of the halves.

Steel Toes’ big change is a tonal shift. Another Day in Paradise was very much a coming-of-age novel, albeit a twisted and black one. Bobbie Prine may have been a killer, a junkie and a petty criminal, but he was also a fourteen year old, still full of a certain optimism and naivete about the world. This is all gone in Steel Toes; the death of Rosie plus years in the joint have permanently altered Bobbie’s disposition for the worse.

The other recurring theme of the novel is Bobbie’s complete inability to escape his life.

As I’ve written before, redemption may be a possibility, but most people are too selfish and short-sighted to take it. The two constants in Bobbie’s life are his heroin addiction and his impulsivity in feeding it, and how he’s constantly getting himself into trouble and alienating his friends because of it. He reunites with a number of characters from Paradise, including his surrogate mother Syd and his friend Ben, and manages to drive them all away through his constant poor decision-making. His attempts to blend into high society fail every time his streetwise junkie instincts flare up, such as in one bizarre scene where he meets a wino in Boston and gets loaded on Wild Irish Rose. He meets a nice upper-class Boston girl named Michelle and drags her into the criminal underworld.

And as the book’s climactic, bloody ending shows, nothing short of death will get Bobbie off of the path he’s stuck on.

This is the reality of life: few if any people can escape their own stupidity. The average moron will keep on making the same mistakes again and again until he dies. Magical transformations are nearly impossible to pull off, and anyone who claims to have done one should be looked at with deep skepticism. Eddie Little understood this; he died barely a year after Steel Toes was published.

This is not a happy book or an uplifting book, but it’s a funny, gripping and real one. Steel Toes isn’t just a viciously honest portrayal of drug addiction and the criminal life, it’s a scathing commentary on American society and human nature. If you haven’t read Another Day in Paradise, read it; if you have, Steel Toes should be next on your list.

Click here to buy Steel Toes.

Read Next: Another Day in Paradise by Eddie Little