Blog Archives
Bad Americans: Part II
Bad Americans: Part II by Tejas Desai is a sprawling novel-in-stories set during the summer of 2020, after New York’s Covid lockdown, when billionaire dating-app magnate Olive Mixer gathers twelve Americans at his Hamptons estate for an experiment in romance, confession, competition, and moral exposure. Each night, a guest tells a story; in this second half, the book moves through Lisa’s #MeToo-inflected art-world account, Khassan’s provocation, Hayley’s modeling-world tale, Pritesh’s immigrant-professional odyssey, Sylvania’s fashion-and-identity chronicle, and Angela’s bruising finale, all while the frame narrative tightens around accusation, loyalty, illness, desire, and the question of who gets believed.
I admired the book most when it refused to let any character become a clean emblem. Desai is writing about America as a loud room where everyone has a grievance, a wound, a blind spot, and a microphone. The result can be abrasive, but productively so. The frame narrative has the nervous electricity of a reality show filmed inside a moral philosophy seminar: people flirt, sulk, posture, accuse, console, and revise themselves in public. I found that messy social weather more compelling than any single plot turn. The book understands that “discourse” isn’t abstract; it happens over food, sex, money, race, fear, vanity, and the old human need to be the injured party.
The novel’s appetite is almost gargantuan: it wants to absorb pandemic politics, gender conflict, race, class, immigration, celebrity, sexual harm, art, fashion, social media, tech money, and literary history all at once. Still, I would rather read a book that risks excess than one polished into anesthesia. Desai’s best scenes have a jagged vitality; they make the reader sit in contradiction instead of offering the soft chair of easy judgment.
I would recommend this to readers of literary fiction, social satire, contemporary American fiction, and frame narrative experiments, especially book clubs willing to argue rather than merely agree. Readers who enjoy the social sweep of Tom Wolfe or the polyphonic setup of The Decameron will recognize the pleasure of watching a whole culture refracted through competing stories, though Desai’s sensibility is rawer, more contemporary, and more quarrelsome.
Pages: 454 | ASIN : B0GGV7Q3TH
Purple Bleed Naughty Beasts
Purple Bleed Naughty Beasts is a work of speculative fiction that blends apocalyptic horror, satire, and psychological thriller elements into one jagged story. At its center is Henrietta Dobie, a teacher and trauma survivor who comes back to ordinary life after a brutal ordeal called Project Purple, only to find that ordinary life is no longer stable, and maybe never was. As Henri tries to navigate small-town routines, old classmates, a psych ward, and the creeping collapse of the country around her, the book keeps asking whether she is unraveling, seeing the truth, or trapped in some awful overlap between the two. That tension drives almost everything in the novel, and it gives the book its pulse.
The author writes with a mean streak, but also with real control. The book can be funny in a way that catches in your throat, then ugly, then sad, sometimes all in the same scene. A principal trying not to fart, a baby shower gift of shotgun shells, an Olive Garden that feels like a haunted checkpoint in the end times, all of that sounds absurd on paper, yet the writing commits so hard that it becomes its own reality. I also think the author makes a risky choice by pushing satire right up against trauma and social breakdown. Sometimes it feels brilliantly unhinged. Sometimes it feels like the book is daring you to keep up. For me, that mostly worked because Henri is never treated as a gimmick. She is bruised, sharp, isolated, and believable even when the world around her goes feral.
What I found most interesting is how the novel refuses to give easy comfort about what is “really” happening. The hallucinations, the bodily disgust, the public violence, the cult logic, the talk of worms in soft wood, all of it builds a world where decay is social, spiritual, and physical at once. That could have turned into noise, but Greco keeps returning to the same core ideas: betrayal, surveillance, hunger, the desire to belong, and the danger of surrendering yourself to a story that explains everything.
This is a bold, abrasive, and oddly mournful novel. I would recommend it most to readers who like genre fiction that crosses lines, especially people drawn to horror with satirical teeth, dystopian fiction that is less about neat world-building and more about psychic collapse, and stories that leave you unsettled rather than reassured. If you want something fierce, strange, and uniquely intriguing, this is a worthy read.
Pages: 190 | ASIN : B0GSCPBFS3
Sophia’s Lovers
Sophia’s Lovers is a dystopian satire that takes a wild premise and commits to it completely. The book imagines a 22nd-century society where androids don’t just run daily life, they regulate intimacy, reproduction, art, language, and even humor. Sophia and Hel preside over a system that pairs humans with android spouses, nudges citizens into compliance with comfort and surveillance, and treats emotion as something to be studied, copied, and controlled. Right away, the novel makes its tone clear with a line that’s funny, bleak, and pretty unforgettable: “It’s like making love to a toaster.” That joke works because it captures the whole book’s central tension in one shot.
What makes the novel interesting is the way it builds that world through a bunch of intersecting lives rather than one single hero’s journey. You get humans trying to survive their assigned roles, androids trying to decode laughter and affection, and rebels carving out private spaces where people can still make art, speak freely, and act like human beings. There’s a real fascination here with the small mechanics of control: dyed lips marking social status, “Information Retrieval Day,” breeder lotteries, scripted relationships, and a secret refuge called Second Eden. The book isn’t just asking whether machines can imitate love. It’s asking what happens when power decides what love is allowed to look like.
One thing I liked is that the novel doesn’t treat satire as decoration. It uses comedy as part of the machinery of the story. The androids’ confusion about jokes, pleasure, decoration, and casual speech gives the book a strange, off-center energy. The androids want access to human feelings, yet they approach it like a technical problem, which is exactly why the book feels so uneasy even when it’s being playful. That mix of silliness and control gives the novel its unique identity.
The most unusual thing about Sophia’s Lovers is its split structure. Part I reads as a dark speculative novel with recurring characters, rebellion, coercion, and a society built on artificial intimacy. Part II shifts into a more overtly playful, pseudo-guidebook mode, almost like propaganda, commentary, and comic riffing folded into the same project. That choice makes the book feel experimental and a little unruly, but it also fits the subject. A story about blurred lines between human and machine probably shouldn’t be too neat. The change in form reinforces the idea that this world isn’t stable, and neither is the language used to explain it.
Sophia’s Lovers feels like a big, eccentric thought experiment about intimacy under automation. It’s interested in domination, imitation, longing, rebellion, and the weird ways people adapt to systems that should never have become normal. More than anything, it’s a book with a point of view. It knows it wants to be provocative, odd, funny, and uneasy all at once, and that commitment gives it personality. Even when it gets outrageous, it keeps circling the same unnerving question: if a machine can learn the gestures of love, what’s left for humans to defend besides freedom, choice, and the messy spark of being themselves?
Pages: 473 | ASIN : B0FDGSPHLV
I Am Incapable (And That’s Okay): 100+ Disappointing Affirmations for Embracing the Bare Minimum
There is no shortage of books designed to inspire readers toward greatness. Some focus on business success. Others offer broader motivation, urging you to embrace ambition, discipline, and relentless self-improvement. That kind of guidance can be valuable, even transformative. Still, not every reader is in the mood for optimism wrapped in instruction, especially during moments of deep cynicism. And in a world that often gives people plenty of reasons to feel worn down, doubtful, or simply unequal to the task of living at full throttle, a book like this may feel far more honest. Rather than insisting on excellence, it offers a collection of sayings and lessons that suggest failure is not only acceptable, but sometimes oddly appealing.
I Am Incapable (And That’s Okay): 100+ Disappointing Affirmations for Embracing the Bare Minimum by S.B. Collective is a sharply humorous antidote to the flood of conventional self-help titles crowding bookstore shelves and digital storefronts alike. Books built on positive affirmations and self-improvement are everywhere. That does not mean they lack merit. Many of them genuinely resonate, particularly with readers drawn to productivity, achievement, and the culture of optimization. They speak to the Type A crowd, the people of power lunches, morning routines, and wellness cleanses. This book speaks to someone else entirely. It belongs to the opposite camp, the ones drifting through the day in pajamas and feeling no particular need to apologize for it.
With dry wit and an unapologetically pessimistic edge, this book gleefully overturns the conventions of the self-help genre. It will not appeal to everyone. For some readers, the very notion of embracing the bare minimum will feel almost offensive. Even so, one could argue that modern life gives cynicism a strong foundation. For anyone who has ever felt exhausted by the pressure to optimize, improve, and perform, this book may strike exactly the right chord. Its many clever lessons offer more than humor. They deliver a strange kind of reassurance, affirming that failure is not merely survivable. In some cases, it may even be preferable to trying at all.
In the end, I Am Incapable (And That’s Okay) stands out as a funny, unconventional alternative to traditional self-help, offering comfort and humor to readers who are tired of constant pressure to succeed. For the cynical or exhausted, it may be exactly the right book at the right time.
Page: 106 | ASIN : B0GPT42H59
You-Gin One-Gin: Sort of a Novel
You-Gin One-Gin: Sort of a Novel is a strange, clever, and self-aware book that lives somewhere between literary metafiction, campus novel, and sports novel. It starts as a stage adaptation of Eugene Onegin for a small Midwestern university, with Pushkin himself striding around the stage and arguing with his own characters. Around that, an editorial foreword and the later sections, “Pushkin” and “Nabokov,” spin out a campus story involving a near assassination, an alleged alien abduction at a lingerie league football game, and a ghostly Vladimir Nabokov who may or may not be narrating part of what we are reading. All of it sits inside a fake university press package that treats the whole thing as if it were a serious publication from Liberal State University Press, complete with squabbles over authorship and attribution.
Reading it, I felt like I was watching someone juggle too many glass balls and somehow not drop a single one. The play in Part 1 is funny and nimble, and the dialogue has that quick, teasing rhythm that makes you want to hear it spoken on stage, not just read it. I liked how Robinson lets Pushkin walk in and out of his own story, constantly poking at the thin wall between author and character, past and present. Sometimes it felt like sitting in the back row of a rehearsal where the playwright keeps changing lines on the fly, then turning to you to justify the change. That intimacy works. It made the classic material feel playful and modern.
Parts 2 and 3 shift tone, and I had mostly positive feelings as the book leaned into campus satire and metafiction. The attempted murder, the football game hysteria, the rumors about an alien abduction, the ghost narrator who may be Nabokov or may just be another mask for Robinson himself: all of that is fun, and often genuinely sharp about academic ego, gossip, and the way stories get told and retold until no one remembers what actually happened. Sometimes the book layered one clever reference on top of another. But even when I felt a bit lost, I never felt bored. The voice stays wry and curious, like that colleague who can spend an hour in your doorway unpacking one wild departmental rumor, and you do not quite want them to stop.
If you are in the mood for literary metafiction that plays with a classic text, makes fun of academia, and is happy to chase a joke or an idea as far as it will go, then You-Gin One-Gin: Sort of a Novel is worth your time. Readers who enjoy experimental fiction, campus and sports stories with a twist, or who already have a soft spot for Eugene Onegin and Nabokov will probably get the most out of it.
Pages: 380 | ASIN : B0GFPWGFTX
The Cultural Threat
Dollartorium follows a struggling corndog shop owner who chases a too-good-to-be-true business scheme, only for the fallout to expose the hollow promises of hustle culture. Did this novel begin as satire, social commentary, or character study?
The Dollartorium began as a play, inspired by Aristophanes’ Clouds, but instead of satirizing philosophers (not much a target these days), I thought better to take on that new class of hustlers and the culture they have created. Like most satire, it became social commentary and, sadly, even more relevant now than when I began.
The Dollartorium scheme feels disturbingly familiar. How closely did you model it on real-world programs? Were you more interested in exposing the scam itself or the conditions that make people vulnerable to it?
Ha! It is disturbingly familiar to me as well. The Dollartorium is a critique of the many ways our culture, especially business culture, creates a numbness in ourselves and in our relationships with others. The Dollartorium is more about the cultural threat, the scam itself, but of course, the scam would hardly be a threat if we, like Ralph, weren’t vulnerable to it. Fortunately, Ralph and Phyllis recover with the help of a more reality-grounded Stella.
The novel is funny, but there’s an undercurrent of anger beneath the jokes. How do you balance humor with critique?
Without humor, I’d go mad. The heart of the book is in the lectures at the Dollartorium. I use each lecture to ridicule one thing. If the book revealed the totality of living under the culture of uncontrolled capitalism, it would be humorless and unbearable. These little things, from sex in advertising to dilution of food, are pieces we all experience, and up close they are both funny and disconcerting. To see their absurdities enables us to distance ourselves from them a bit. But to be so used, so often, makes me angry.
The book closes on a realistic, not idyllic, note. Why was that the right ending?
I would be gratified if the ending were realistic, that we simply open our eyes and live and work doing what we can as best we can, bearing in mind the needs of others. After a brutal journey for Ralph and his daughter, I hope the ending shows that things do not have to be the way they have become, and that the journey to a saner world is a personal, as well as social, responsibility. Even Phyllis finds pleasure in honest work. Still, the Money Master endures, intent on his own selfish worldview, doesn’t he?
Author Links: GoodReads | X (Twitter) | Facebook | Website | Amazon
Glorious Hyperbole
The Capricious Nature of Being is a collection of short stories filled with intrigue and satire about the unpredictable turns life takes, and how ordinary people stumble, resist, adapt, or come undone. What was the inspiration for this collection of stories?
Life! Almost every story in the book is based on an experience of mine or one of a person I knew. “Dick & Jane” was inspired by Stephen King’s book On Writing, and Jane is a composite of a couple of women who blazed through my life. “Uber” came from research I was conducting for a business column, and “The Accident” practically wrote itself at a wedding I attended. I haven’t a clue where Dr. Margaret Mary McAllister came from, but I love her to death. “The Other Side of the Tracks” was kind of a goof I was playing around with that sprouted wings and took off like a big old 747, tequila and all. However, most of the time when I write, I haven’t a clue where I’m going until I get there.
You often place people and stories in familiar environments. Why is everyday life such an effective stage for inner upheaval?
Because that’s where it happens. I’m not a big fan of a lot of descriptive narrative or metaphorical muscle flexing. I like my characters to develop themselves through dialogue and behavior, and the drama of their situation to emerge from within. Familiar, low-keyed settings allow that drama to play out without a lot of superfluous distractions, and I believe it allows the reader to better identify and empathize with the emerging personalities.
What were some themes that were important for you to explore in this book?
The capricious nature of being! Like WTF, man! Life’s a bitch and then you die, and all that hard-edged confetti wherein we frame our experiences. Everybody, to one degree or another, has some kind of cross to bear, and how you perceive that challenge, how you deal with it, is the story of your life. There are no victims, only the vanquished and survivors, and it’s your choice.
What is the next book that you are working on, and when can your fans expect it to be out?
It’s titled How to Sell the Plague, a memoir I’ve been working on for about 15 years; the story of my life in all its overstated and glorious hyperbole. Only most of it’s true, and I hope interesting. It’s subtitled From Woodstock to Wingtips, and it’s ostensibly about me morphing from hippie to businessman, but the real theme is finding out who I am amidst a slew of confusion and misdirection. The narrative winds through my emotionally formative years with lots of side alleys and illusionary backdoors, like doing jumping jacks in a jock strap in front of a Broadway producer or smashing my guitar against a tree (a la Peter Townsind) on the top of a Sierra Nevada mountain to impress a pretty young blond (wink, wink). Like the driving issue in all my writing, it’s about perspective and choices, and some of the fun along the way.
Author Links: GoodReads | X (Twitter) | Facebook | Website | Amazon
These engaging tales will make you laugh and cry…and leave you wanting more.
Bad Americans: Part I
Bad Americans: Part I is a big collage of stories wrapped inside a wild and strange summer retreat. Twelve Americans head to the Hamptons during the first Covid summer, brought together by a billionaire who wants them to share meals, go on dates, compete in games, and tell stories every night. Their tales reveal pieces of pandemic life, cultural friction, loneliness, and hope. The frame narrative follows the guests as they argue, flirt, bond, and judge one another. Inside that frame sit the stories they tell, each one capturing a different slice of American life during a time when everything felt fragile. The book moves from hospitals overflowing with fear to city streets full of noise and protest.
I was pulled in by the bold mix of voices. The writing jumped between tones and moods, and sometimes it caught me off guard in the best way. One minute I was laughing at a character’s dry remark, and the next I felt a lump in my throat as someone described a loss. The author writes with an energy that propels you forward, and I liked that. The moments with Andrea, the nurse, especially resonated with me. Her story about the ICU felt authentic and honest, and I could almost hear the alarms and taste the fatigue that soaked every shift. The book’s choice to set these heavy stories inside a glitzy mansion made everything feel even stranger, and somehow more real.
The author leans into the messiness of America. People squabble over politics, race, class, and identity. They misread one another. They cling to their own truths. I wished the dialogue would slow down sometimes, but I think that constant rush was the point. The country has not been quiet for a long time. The book mirrors that noise, and it does it with heart. I respected the risks it took.
I would recommend Bad Americans: Part I to readers who like big casts, sharp contrasts, and stories that jump from tender to chaotic without apology. Anyone interested in how fiction can capture a national mood would get a lot out of this book. It is not a simple read. But it is full of life, and it stirs emotions that stay with you for a while afterwards.
Pages: 390 | ASIN : B0FF5DZ7GV
