Book Club From Hell

Officeparks  is a wonderful poetry collection from Noam Hessler, and yet another winner published by Farthest Heaven. Romantic, funny, and shot through with an easy, natural experimentation, Officeparks is a real treat. I'm trying hard not to be too effusive in my praise, in case people think I'm being disingenuous, but these poems really are that good.  Anyway, Noam and I got to talk about their...

Quan Millz is a maestro of urban fiction. Since 2017, he has self-published over 70 books and (apparently) made more than $500,000 from titles such as Old THOT Next Door, Pastors Eat Pwussy Too, Pregnant by My Gay Stepdaddy, and, the subject of today's episode, This Hoe Got Roaches in Her Crib. It's a tale of characters who make remarkably poor decisions, and with a tone veering wildly between sla...

Like You Have a Choice is the first short story collection from Ivan Niccolai, the man behind the Notes from the Periphery Substack. We talk about Melbourne's inner-north, wogs, JG Ballard, Mark Fisher, Nick Land, bilingual writing, watering the driveway on Sunday morning (wogs), accelerationism, lemon trees in the back yard (wogs), illegal satellite dishes in the back yard (wogs), and a whole lot...

Eumeswil (1977) is one of Jünger's final novels, and is bizarre, inscrutable, and wonderful. It is, in many ways, a glassy dramatisation of the second volume of Oswald Spengler's The Decline of the West, and also an introduction to Jünger's archetype of the anarch, a series of odd animal metaphors, a collection of fragmented musings by a survivor of two World Wars, and a whole lot more. Helping me...

Grendel VVept is a bizarre book that I can kind of describe as Joycean cosmic horror, but that doesn't cover everything. Traveling through time and prose styles, from today to Renaissance Italy to Sumer to ages even more distant, it's disorienting in a fascinating way. Playing God, the other book of Serret's that I read for this episode, is a tight novella set in 1969 America, with a lot of teenag...

Gabe Sinclair and I talk about the 'Cities and Peoples' section of the second volume of Spengler's The Decline of the West. Cities versus nomads, Spengler's particular definition of race, language, landscape, The Elder Scrolls, and a whole lot more. Gabe on X: @ezrarunnaround Tooky's Mag on X: @tookysmag VERY IMPORTANT INFORMATION Jack has published a novel called Tower ! Amazon: https://www.amazo...

Sleep Capricorn is an absolutely fantastic short story collection by Jack Norman, to be published soon by  Bonfire Books. Formally inventive with some of the best prose I've read in years, everyone should go get a copy from  www.bonfirebooks.org . Jack on X: @Thingol2006 Jack on Substack: thingol.substack.com VERY IMPORTANT INFORMATION Jack has published a novel called Tower ! Amazon: https://www....

Cyclomancy: The Secret of Psychic Power Control (1966) is a self-help book written to give readers access to their Primal Autoconscious. Why would someone want access to their Primal Autoconscious? Because they want to have psychic powers. And why would anyone want psychic powers? If the examples given in this book are anything to go by, to make sure your wife isn't cheating on you. I reckon about...

I (Jack) am joined by Gabe of Tooky's Mag to talk about the first three chapters of Spengler's best book: The Decline of the West, volume II. This will hopefully be a semi-regular series where we talk about a few chapters of this book in-depth. Prepare for levels of autism never seen before or since the German Conservative Revolution. Apologies for some choppiness with the audio--my microphone kep...

Welcome to the Desert of the Real (2002) is Slavoj Žižek talking about 9/11 from a Lacanian, Hegelian, Ljubljana-slobber-in-a-stained-Lenin-T-shirt perspective. For this episode, the wonderful Stephen G Adubato of Cracks in Postmodernity helped me navigate Žižek's discursive 'It feels like I'm reading five books at once' style. Cracks in Postmodernity: https://cracksinpomo.substack.com/ VERY IMPOR...

Tom Will is a poet who has, among other things, written Pale Townie (Apocalypse Confidential, 2023), a 999-line poem which keeps the heroic couplet end rhymes from Pale Fire (Nabokov/Shade) intact, while transforming the story into something quite different, very Tom Will. He's also recently published American Cats Are in a Big Country (2024, Farthest Heaven), a collection of 73 poems, all of whic...

Written in prison in 2002, The System's Neatest Trick is an essay from Kaczynski's Technological Slavery. In it, Kaczynski describes how 'the System' - more or less a technological society - redirects the popular frustration caused by its intrusions into human life, and its subversion of the power process. Where does it redirect this frustration? Into 'activist' causes, both as a pressure-release...

Spare Us Yet is a short-story collection from Lucas Smith, the Editor-in-chief of Bonfire Books. Each story is a new examination of Christian faith, human fallibility and our ways of finding meaning, and are all well worth your time. Bonfire Books: www.bonfirebooks.org Wiseblood Books: www.wisebloodbooks.com/ Lucas' Substack: https://lucassmith.substack.com/ Bonfire Books' Substack: https://bonfir...

Otto Weininger, at the age of 23, published Sex and Character, an idealist justification for not trusting the cosmic Woman, as well as an extended rumination on genius, sexual compatibility, Judaism, memory, ethics, and logic, all upon the background of his sexual fears. Shortly after the book's tepid critical reception, including accusations of plagiarism, Weininger rented a room in the building...

The Everlasting is an excellent short story collection by Australia's favourite son, Lewis Woolston. Many of these stories are inspired by his upbringing among Jehovah's Witnesses in Western Australia, addiction, working bad jobs to stave off poverty, and, despite everything, having the fortitude to find a place of stability. This is Lewis' second time on the show - if you want to hear more from h...

Wake in Fright (1961) is an Australian novel about a pushover Sydney city boy's experiences in Broken Hill-inspired Bundanyabba. Here, he loses all of his money gambling, is constantly drunk, knife fights kangaroos, tries to shoot himself, and much more. To help me gush over this sinister and very funny book, I enlisted the help of Matthew Sini and Matthew Fresta of the lovely Getting Lit podcast....

Financed by her husband as a 10th wedding anniversary present and published in 1897, Irene Iddesleigh is a romance story featuring extremely mercurial characters, bizarre pacing, and the most insane purple prose in existence. Really, The Eye of Argon reads like a physics textbook in comparison. VERY IMPORTANT INFORMATION Jack has published a novel called Tower ! Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Towe...

Transmaxxing is when natal males make themselves into women in order to live a materially better life. The Transmaxxing Manifesto lays out why men would (that is, should ) want to become women, why an essential gender identity doesn't exist, how to 'girl-mode', why men are useless, and how to bring about a global authoritarian transmaxxing state in which 5% of the population are breeding males, 50...

On High at Red Tide is a rough, scruffy, lovely, unsettling, surf-noir novel written by Gabriel Hart, a novelist, poet, musician, and reporter (among many things). We got to talk about petrifying trazedone hallucinations, the parallels between alcoholism and possession, meth, why it's always wrong to kill someone, LA subcultures, and a whole lot more. Get On High at Red Tide: https://pigroastpubli...

Published in 1899, The Interpretation of Dreams is one of Sigmund Freud's most significant works and, by extension, one of the most significant works in psychoanalysis, psychology, and the Western conception of the mind. In it, Freud begins with a collection of questions: what are dreams? What can we learn from them? In trying to answer, he ends up describing a structure of energetic flows between...

Dustin Cole is a Canadian poet, novelist, essayist and short story writer, whose latest chapbook After Sunstone is a lovely examination of seeing, times and places. I actually ended up buying this book on the basis of its cover: it's a great edition, put out by Farthest Heaven. We talked about the link between poetry and time, poetry as a way to say the unsaid, why Dustin no longer writes novels,...

This article, published in 2015 in the International Feminist Journal of Politics, offers a description of how the experience of piloting hunter-killer UAVs could 'queer' the battlefield and offer possible lines of flight out of heteronormative hierarchies. Poststructuralism meets mainlining hours of war footage on the internet (not really) (yes really). VERY IMPORTANT INFORMATION Jack has publish...

Matthew Gasda is a director, novelist, playwright, essayist and Memphis horrorcore rapper, who has a novel, The Sleepers, coming out on the 6th of May, 2025. Tightly stage-managed and reading like a thickened play, The Sleepers explores millennial listlessness. This episode doubles as a New York soundscape, Matthew calling in from a cafe and crunching lemonade ice cubes tenderly into his microphon...

Jaime García-Iglesias explores the phenomenon of bugchasing from a sociological perspective. And what is bugchasing? According to García-Iglesias, it is the eroticisation of HIV, expressed in many ways: getting pozzed by a detectable giftgiver during bareback sauna sex, masturbating to #poz and #BBBH ('bareback brotherhood') accounts on X, tracing your viral genealogy to Michel Foucault... the pos...

Udith Dematagoda is an academic, novelist, musician, editor at Hyperidean Press, and the reincarnated form of Ned Ludd, who, among other things, published a great novel called Agonist last year.   An actually experimental experimental novel, Agonist is a rendering of posts and videos from around the internet into a strangely coherent whole. It's much funnier and more human than a depiction of the...