The Unbearables, The Worst Book I Ever Read (Autonomedia Books, 2009)"2009’s funnest book was The Worst Book I Ever Read, an anthology of writings from the Unbearables, a loose confederation of New York poets and writers, edited by Ron Kolm, et al. Several pieces consist of pointed criticisms of classic works or books by modern masters. For example, the Bible receives a harsh rebuke in “Holy Shit! My Gripes with the Bible” by John G. Rodwan, Jr., who calls it “[a]n awful book … a mishmash of so much balderdash that I can only think it is widely revered because it is hardly read.” One-time Unbearable and current Los Angeles Times books editor, David L. Ulin, tears into modern literature’s most sacred cow: “Ulysses is without a doubt the worst important book I’ve ever read,” he says, “a mess of arrogant self-indulgence that refuses to hang together, that has more to do with the ego of its author than with the organic urgency of its plot.” Contemporary authors of dubious merit or unwarranted reputation likewise receive withering abuse. “Joyce Carol Oates is more prolific than a brood sow,” declares Jessica Willis. “She’s always putting out something fat and new. But not new.” In a rant titled “Fuck You, David Sedaris,” Marvin J. Taylor denounces Sedaris’ shallowness, on exhibit in Me Talk Pretty One Day, which “at first appears naughty, but is not threatening, so the dull-minded listeners of NPR can feel self-satisfied that they are sufficiently hip and non-homophobic when they listen to the weaselly voice of Sedaris as he lisps his way through his turgid prose.” Lacking any pretense to civility, the book’s contributors let loose unsparing, profane invective against their targets. The Worst Book I Ever Read says things about authors and books that few readers would dare say out loud, let alone publish, defiantly and hilariously raising a middle finger at literary lameness and publishing torpor." - Tim W. Brown
“The Unbearables bare all; they are unbearably smart, unbearably talented, and unbearably lively — but here are the Unbearables at their highly bearable best. It’s a pleasure to find out what this group finds unbearable in such an engaging manner.” — Samuel Delany
“The Unbearables have doggedly held onto their collective ideal, punk irreverence, and endless store of creative energy. It’s like the Disneyfication of downtown New York never happened.” — Brandon Stosuy
"The Unbearables are a bunch of cranks, crackpots, malcontents, misanthropes, ass-pains and brain-aches. Bless their sour pusses.” — John Strausbaugh
“Is this ‘nuevo lingo’ or just the infuriating talent of the avant garde? Kauffman and Feast, among others, self-expertise their talents of the comic thrown off centrifuge. So hang onto the Handel bars. The values here are devious, deviant, and delicious.” — Barney Rosset
"Welcome to the Labyrinth of multiple negatives. Books so bad they’re perfect to pillory populate the latest Unbearables anthology, a lavish production whose reach tries strenuously to exceed its grasp; but nobody grasps like an Unbearable. The world is their oyster and it isn’t easily digestible.
Even without counting graphic artists such as David Sandlin, Kaz, and Ken Brown, over 70 contributors take pot shots at the books that bother them, and they don’t waste time on trash. Each takes a tangent off the concept and few look back, that’s not how they roll. Some state their premise clearly like a survey response or an assignment, others go after imaginary titles (Jerome Sala) or their own work (Ron Kolm). The work is at its most enjoyable when core members wallow in self-mythologizing, inventing characters out of each other. bart plantenga turns in a novelesque tale of proofreaders driven too far, Mike Randall paints the Unbearable Big Fish as “relentlessly cruising the shallow water for talent that will cough up some ‘edgy’ material for less than scale.”
Tribulations of the writer’s life are the one keen constant. Despite some targets being hit more than once, like the Bible, James Joyce, and the Chicago Manual of Style, no two entries are alike. Some of the Beats are back for another drubbing, along with their parasitic hangers-on, taken out by Gerald Nicosia and Mike Golden, while Henry Darger and Barbie hide behind Gertrude Stein. Lit pop-stars like Sedaris and Chabon, icons like Ballard, Borges, Mailer and Calvino are roasted as well, more for being distracting or disappointing than execrable. By digging into the books that have riled them up, this pack of writer/proles has levitated a pungent Pentagon of provoking prose out of a hole greater than some of its parts." - Kevin Riordan
"One of our favorites of the years, for which we ordered about a dozen copies for friends and family of a certain bent, is The Unbearables' The Worst Book I Ever Read, a collection of essays on bad literary experiences that is howlingly funny, terribly erudite and witty, and coincidentally inclusive of a number of great writers with sometimes deep/sometimes illegal ties to the region, including Sparrow, Kingston-based Luc Sante, Peter Lamborn Wilson, Carl Watson, Michael Carter, and 70-some other writers, illustrators and general malcontents.
Ever wanted to take the vinegar out of James Joyce or Gertrude Stein, kick Hemingway or the Beats around a bit? Had enough of David Sedaris' schtick? This is the book for you...although if kept on a beside table, it can prove distracting. Hey, the laughter is contagious...
The Unbearables, by the way, call themselves (on their quasi-website... google it) "noir humorists, beer mystics, anarchists, neophobes and passionate debunkers" and pinpoint their beginnings to 1985, when they started meeting at the Tin Pan Alley Bar in midtown Manhattan and subsequently started taking on the Beats, The New Yorker, and briefly liberated the Brooklyn Bridge." - Paul Smart
"The Unbearables have been known for pulling the Persian rug out from under the literary establishment. Their newest anthology, then, The Worst Book I Ever Read, where each of the Unbearable contributors, self described as ‘poetic terrorists,’ are given the opportunity to eviscerate a dearly despised book promises to be bloody. Indeed, the centerfold, displaying, according to its introduction, “a few of the many ways a ‘bad’ book can be deconstructed,” shows several ‘bloody’ images and blood can at least be inferred in nearly all of them. The play, of course, is on the deconstruction. What’s the difference between deconstruction and destruction? Somewhere in between, there’s a con.
What you begin to realize while reading the worst book is that rather than pulling the Persian rug out from under these worst books, it’s rolling out the red carpet. It does this not in a cheap tabloid sense where bad publicity boosts fame, but in a sneakier way. First of all, it must be said that no blanket claims can be made about this book. Each contributor approaches the theme differently, and the books attacked range from the usual suspects to books you’ve never heard of, to books you wouldn’t think of, to books that don’t exist. While there is rhyme to the anthology’s organization there’s no reason to read it by order of appearance. But be careful with what you skip. A piece on dictionaries taught this inexperienced dictionary buyer a valuable lesson, and Nicosia and Vitale’s footnotes are not to be skipped. The individual character of each contribution promises a different experience each time you approach the book. That being said, over the course of reading you do start to see, if not a pattern, a notion that collects some amount of steam. The thing you begin to notice is that these books are the worst not necessarily because of any deficiency but because of their tremendous power. The worst books have the power to make a not-very-wonderful man rise to the occasion, to cause natural disasters while reading, to end relationships, to hurt and eat you, to teach you the power of “bad” words, to give birth to doppelgangers, to ruin you on movies that could have been horrible in their own right instead of being horrible by comparison, to win Pulitzer in spite of themselves, to inspire a creative rancor. Most of all, the worst books have the power to live on after their death/destruction—the first page of the book is the worst book’s tombstone.
We’ve still to deal with the title. The anthology declares itself The Worst Book… If it would seem that we go from bloody terrorism to humbly, self-deprecating testament to the power of literature, even at its worst, the con doesn’t end there. The power of literature, as clearly displayed by those worst books is a dangerous power, and The Worst Book as a title goes from self-deprecation to usurpation of that dangerous power of worst books. The bloody terrorism returns and we realize the carpet is red for a reason. “A final aporia,” Zummer offers in “I Play My Guitar The Way I Want,” “once again, it is often the case that the very worst books that one reads also open onto, and even reside among, the very best.” The Worst Book takes this to its very extreme. The best of literature resides in literature at its bloody worst." - Anitta Santiago
"The worst book I ever read was one I wrote myself. I’m not trying to be cute, or ironic or anything, and I’m not just talking about lousy prose or a lack of comprehensible plot -- though my book had no real plot (at the time I thought ‘plot’ in a piece of writing was an ethically challenged writer’s way of joining the great capitalist plot to keep the people down - you know, like throwing already digested gruel on the ground in front of domesticated animals - I figured a great book should make the reader work, thus heightening his, or her, consciousness.) There were no real characters in my manuscript and the prose was pretty crappy, a hodge-podge of Joycean nonsense - most postmodern, read; contemporary, attempts at edgy or avant-garde literature come to grief on the reef of James Joyce.
I recently finished A Reader's Manifesto: An Attack on the Growing Pretentiousness in American Literary Prose by B. R. Myers, a screed attacking the second-rate writing of Paul Auster, Cormac McCarthy, Don DeLillo and Annie Proulx, among others. (I would love to have gotten a piece from him for this anthology - Hell, we should sell copies with his book shrink-wrapped to it - like that textbook bundling thing.) Anyway, one of Myers’ criticisms of their novels is that they suffer from the ’andsies’ - sentences that go on forever, subordinate clauses linked to each other by the word ’and.’ And, of course, it all goes back to Molly Bloom’s soliloquy - one of the more famous passages in twentieth-century writing - and one of the few totally enjoyable and easily understood passages in Ulysses. My book suffered from the ‘andsies,’ too, as well as a plethora of portmanteau words, also invented by Mr. Joyce, etc." - Ron Kolm
"A couple of years ago author and provocateur Ron Kolm began soliciting from his Unbearables crew contributions to an anthology containing essays about the worst books they had ever read. The result, aptly, is The Worst Book I Ever Read, recently out from the radical Brooklyn publisher Autonomedia. Kolm and his fellow editors have produced 416 pages of violence and mayhem committed against literary works and authors both familiar and obscure.
The Unbearables, for those who don’t know of them, are a loose confederation of poets and writers who came of age in 1980s and 90s New York. Infamous for their high-minded aesthetics and low, barroom manners, the group has sought to torment literary powers-that-be throughout its more than two decades of existence. The group is probably best known for organizing a boycott in 1995 of The New Yorker, protesting its flaccid, middle-of-the-road poetry. Their campaign eventually led “the most righteously un of the Unbearables,” the poet Sparrow, to be published in its august pages. The Worst Book I Ever Read is the Unbearables’ latest attempt at being royal pains.
Several responses to Kolm’s call took the form of pointed criticisms of classic works or books by modern masters. For example, the Bible receives a harsh rebuke in “Holy Shit! My Gripes with the Bible” by John G. Rodwan, Jr., who calls it “[a]n awful book ... a mishmash of so much balderdash that I can only think it is widely revered because it is hardly read.” One-time Unbearable and current Los Angeles Times books editor, David L. Ulin, flings his critical knives at modern lit’s most sacred cow. “Ulysses is without a doubt the worst important book I’ve ever read,” he says, “a mess of arrogant self-indulgence that refuses to hang together, that has more to do with the ego of its author than with the organic urgency of its plot.”
Thus concludes any pretense to civility in the book. The gloves come off, the language turns foul, and the true fun begins as the book’s contributors let loose unsparing invective against their targets. Probably the most over-the-top contributor is Alan Kaufman, who, despite universal opprobrium concerning the “C” word, damns “[f]ucking fat cunt Gertrude Stein,” for authoring The Making of the Americans, “an unreadable nightmare of brainwashing [and] grammatical abuse” lasting 925 pages.
Authors of dubious merit or unwarranted reputation receive withering abuse. “Joyce Carol Oates is more prolific than a brood sow,” declares Jessica Willis. “She’s always putting out something fat and new. But not new.” In a rant titled “Fuck You, David Sedaris,” Marvin J. Taylor denounces Sedaris’ shallowness, on exhibit in Me Talk Pretty One Day, which “at first appears naughty, but is not threatening, so the dull-minded listeners of NPR can feel self-satisfied that they are sufficiently hip and non-homophobic when they listen to the weaselly voice of Sedaris as he lisps his way through his turgid prose.”
A couple of contributors criticize their own work. José Padua is at first pleased when a poem of his is accepted in an anthology titled Mondo Barbie. Later, upon unwrapping his contributor’s copy, he is horrorstruck: “[T]hese pages are fucking pink. Oh my fucking god!” he exclaims. “[T]his might be the worst fucking book ever. And I’m in it.” [Italics in original] Kolm confesses the worst book he ever read, Grand Days, “was one I wrote myself. I’m not trying to be cute, or ironic, or anything. There were no real characters in my manuscript, and the prose was pretty crappy, a hodge-podge of Joycean nonsense.”
The books discussed in the anthology provoke strong reactions among contributors that tend to be highly idiosyncratic and personal in nature. Michael Lindgren expands the discussion to institutional reasons for why so many books are bad. Referring to Miss Misery, by Andy Greenwald, Lindgren asks:
Does no one have the patience or fortitude or just plain ambition to think up a set of characters and locale that betray the presence of an original idea? Must every shitty novel I pick up be a thinly veiled set of diary entries transferred to the page with barely the effort to change the names involved? Am I hopelessly old-fashioned to think books should sometimes have ... one of those, you know, “plot” thingies? What the fuck is wrong with novelists—not to mention publishers—today?”
All projects like The Worst Book I Ever Read are uneven in the material they present. Whereas many pieces in the anthology are deadly accurate—and full of wit and menace besides—included are several unsuccessful pieces, mostly toward the back of the book, that drop informed, quasi-objective assessment in favor of impressionistic, metafictional or poetic interpretations of their subjects. Preferable are the direct, full-frontal assaults that make up the bulk of the book, which are in keeping with the rowdy Unbearables ethos.
The Worst Book I Ever Read keeps the Unbearables’ flag defiantly raised amid institutional corruption, literary lameness and publishing torpor. With the addition of peers going down parallel paths of disaffection and younger authors awakening to corporate and consensus America’s drone, the book proudly extends the Unbearables brand." - Tim W. Brown
