Category Archives: Books/Media

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

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

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 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

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