Podcast appearance - Book Club From Hell
Chatting with Jack BC about my debut novel, INCEL
I had an absolute blast chatting with
on his podcast, .We covered a ton of interesting ground for this conversation around the origin of my debut novel,1 the joy of literary process (and obsessive prose-tweaking), as well as the overarching questions around the topic of incels and modern male alienation more broadly. It’s an absolute privilege to engage with fellow writers and readers outside of the “purity coffin” of mainline literary fiction and really get into the meat of interesting but otherwise prohibited topics like androgenic interiority.
Book Club From Hell is a great literary podcast and a perfect example of the “spatially-distributed literary salon” that’s organically emerging at the margins of the literary publishing sphere.2 I’ve borrowed a joke from
that they’re “enlightened centrists” in the sense that their literary analysis feels very syncretic and balanced (i.e. the opposite of being capture by what describes as the trap of being “woke or anti-woke”).Being marginal, in this case, is good, because it frees up the literary commentariat to talk about topics that are otherwise verboten or heavily suppressed in prestige literary circles (e.g. male vulnerability in fiction).3
Some quick notes on this appearance:
- has his own novel, Tower, I’ll be reviewing on my Substack later this fall. He’s got some chapters posted on his own personal Substack.
Thank you to
of for suggesting that I reach out to the team. You may notice I referenced a previous (as of yet unreleased) interview I did one-on-one with Gabe, which was also an incredibly fun chat.I name-drop and recommend a bunch of other writers in the podcast (e.g.
), and you can read this list here.- recently put out a nice review of my novel (thanks Greg!). It’s a real privilege to be closely read by other writers and readers who are open to self-published works that aim to be serious literary projects in their own right.
Buy it here! And if you’ve already bought it, please review it on Amazon + Goodreads!
I particularly enjoyed their episodes on Nick Land’s famous “Meltdown” essay and Curtis Yarvin’s “Cathedral” model of decentralized elite conformity in the academia/media/NGO-complex (one day I’d like to write a detailed post that fuses this model with Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent model of media conformity, but I haven’t gotten around to it).
There are many good pieces that have come up lately around this:
Andrew Boryga has written one that did very well, Christopher Jesu Lee had another great take, and Ross Barkan has had a number of excellent articles about literary “meta”-criticism.
BCfH is the best of us (in contrast to me & Gabe who are the worst of us)