Podcast appearance - Contra with Pedro Gonzalez (May 2025)
Chatting with Pedro about literature, politics, and identity
First, some quick updates:
The Delinquent Academic enjoyed my novel, INCEL, and posted a review on his eponymous blog:
But as you may have intuited even before I quoted that sequence, ARX-Han’s dedication to realism with the crassness of the language chosen and scenes described, combined with the hyper-intellectual ‘thinks he’s not an autist’ internal-monologue of Anon, means my suggestion that the broader public should read this is nonsense, really. It is for a certain type of person, I am not going to lie. But that’s why its great. ARX-Han did not compromise.
Honestly, I do not think I am exaggerating, it goes: American Psycho, Bret Easton Ellis, Fight Club, Chuck Palahniuk, and Incel, ARX-Han.
I’ll be appearing on his podcast sometime this summer as we finalize a recording date.
Ian Barr also reviewed the book on The Word Dump, but found it challenging for other reasons:
On the whole, I feel a bit mixed about INCEL after finishing it. On the one hand, the style and prose are a masterwork that are beautifully written and articulated. It’s definitively different and unique from other fiction on the market, unabashedly itself in a sea of pandering fiction that toes the line as though it’s afraid to offend anyone. On the other hand, the majority of this book confronts uncomfortable topics from the POV of a deeply troubled individual.
The podcasts will continue until morale improves
I have a ton of fun meeting other writers online, having conversations, and sharing these conversations with others. For whatever (hilarious) reason—probably my vocal modulator—the views on my audio interviews are always much lower than my standard written pieces.
It’s a good thing I don’t need to make any money on this website, then!
In any event, Pedro L. Gonzalez and I had an interesting and wide-ranging discussion on a number of interrelated literary and cultural topics, including the decline of Twitter, Substack as a platform for indie writers, why I got into writing, the limits of promiscuous-autofiction-as-a-genre, inceldom, fandom-vs-race-based identity formation (particularly among millennials who came of age prior to wokeness), geopolitical multipolarity as a force for artistic generation, the current state of literature, the value of agency as an indie-novelist (shoutout to Moravagine’s favorite term ^_^), and the joys of being a wordcel in the year 2025.
Pedro has an interesting background in that he came up in the political sphere and has since left that space and has chosen to become more literary. Although we didn’t intend to, we had an interim discussion about Trump and the absurdity of the tariff policies (which have since been rolled back).1
Podcasts are a great simulacrum of the literary salon and I’m glad that Substack has great integration with the audio component for writers.
While no platform is perfect, I think it’s about as good as it could be.
Desiderata
I recently completed some notable commentary or reviews on a number of titles that just came out:
Ross Barkan’s excellent Glass Century recently came out to widespread acclaim: rather than add another typical review, I got into some theorycel musings around NYC and literary notions of human agency.
Matthew Gasda’s similarly strong The Sleepers was a brutal takedown of millennial self-actualization converging on utilitarianism.
I’ve got 2 other Arcade Publishing books in my review queue: The Agonies and Stop All the Clocks.
Lastly, I’m working on a review of Alan Rossi’s excellent Our Last Year, which was a truly underappreciated gem of a novel.
People seem to really be connecting with the book reviews, so they will be making up a good chunk of the blog’s focus moving forward. I’m now firmly convinced that shining a light on great but unappreciated works is the most positive-sum thing I can contribute to decentralized fiction, so that is what I will continue to do!
Shoutout to Hua Bin’s piece on Rare Earth Metals and military technology if you want a good laugh about how ridiculous of a situation this is. Jokes aside, the recent bans on PRC open source LLM’s & Huawei chips do indeed seem hugely significant.
Pick me! Only three people in the world have read my novel (that I know of).
Excited to see you write about The Agonies! I thought it was very good.