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 valve on popular discontent, and as a way to expedite the social changes required for an expansion o...
Jul 27, 2025•1 hr 42 min•Ep. 145
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://bonfirebooks.substack.com/ Lucas' Recommendations Caleb Caudell: https://middleamericanliterature.substack...
Jul 20, 2025•1 hr 12 min•Ep. 144
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 where Beethoven died. Here, he shot himself in the chest, gaining himself a number of posthumous adm...
Jul 13, 2025•1 hr 45 min•Ep. 143
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 him, we did a previous episode where we talked about another of his short story collections, Remember...
Jul 06, 2025•1 hr 8 min•Ep. 142
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. For the second part of this conversation, where we talk about the 1971 film adaptation of Wake in F...
Jun 29, 2025•1 hr 55 min•Ep. 141
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/Tower-Jack-BC-ebook/dp/B0CM5P9N9M/ref=monarch_sidesheet The first nine chapters of Tower are available f...
Jun 22, 2025•2 hr 4 min•Ep. 140
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% are natal females, and the 45% of men insufficiently masculine to breed are forced to take oestrad...
Jun 08, 2025•2 hr 9 min•Ep. 139
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://pigroastpublishing.com/product/on-high-at-red-tide/ Get On High at Red Tide on Amazon, if that's your thing: http...
Jun 02, 2025•1 hr 21 min•Ep. 138
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 the conscious, preconscious and unconscious portions of the psyche. Turns out, there's more to Freu...
May 25, 2025•2 hr 27 min•Ep. 137
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, SE Hinton's novel Rumble Fish , Robin Blaser's essay The Fire, dissatisfaction, and much more. Buy A...
May 20, 2025•1 hr 31 min•Ep. 136
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 published a novel called Tower ! Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Tower-Jack-BC-ebook/dp/B0CM5P9N9M/ref=monar...
May 11, 2025•1 hr 54 min•Ep. 135
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 microphone (your ear). Buy The Sleepers here: https://www.amazon.com/Sleepers-Novel-Matthew-Gasda/dp/16482112...
May 04, 2025•47 min•Ep. 134
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 possibilities are endless. Link to the article: https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-031-11352-...
Apr 27, 2025•2 hr 23 min•Ep. 133
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 internet-void has any right to be. We also talked about infantilism, internet guys, e-girls, fatherhoo...
Apr 20, 2025•1 hr 52 min•Ep. 132
Published in 1932, the Futurist Cook Book is part comedy, part manifesto, and all cook book (kind of). Concerned as much with the extra-gustatory as the gustatory aspects of dining, this cook book offers a Futurist, anti-passeist approach to meals, one that embraces the Futurist principles of speed, violence and contempt for women. Most importantly, it identifies and denounces the primary threat to Italian nationalism: pasta. VERY IMPORTANT INFORMATION Jack has published a novel called Tower ! A...
Apr 13, 2025•1 hr 42 min•Ep. 131
We've broken our usual upload schedule for a very special Book Club from Heaven episode. Why? Because Echolalia Review, by Jasper Ceylon, is so painfully funny. Jasper has performed an elaborate poetic hoax: over roughly two years, he wrote a series of poems, 47 of which were published in 30 different poetry journals. The thing is, these poems were written to be as ridiculous as possible, then submitted under a series of assumed identities, also completely ridiculous. Echolalia Review is a colle...
Apr 06, 2025•2 hr 52 min•Ep. 130
Max Thrax, managing editor of Apocalypse Confidential and 3rd-century Roman emperor, has written a book called God Is a Killer. An extremely fast-paced noir crime novel, it's great fun to read. Among other things, we talked genre fiction, the differences between noir and hardboiled, JG Ballard, independent publishing, and more. Buy God Is a Killer (it's very, very good): https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CM8WKBW7 Check out Apocalypse Confidential: https://apocalypse-confidential.com/ Max on Twitter: @...
Mar 30, 2025•1 hr 25 min•Ep. 129
Solenoid is a novel by Romanian novelist, essayist and poet Mircea Cărtărescu. A bizarre work of alternate-timeline autobiography, Solenoid is the diary of M.C., and details his attempts to escape from his life through dream magic, hypercube contemplation, scabies-mite transfiguration, solenoid levitation, tuberculosis recuperation, and much, much more. It's a truly dizzying, high-dimensional novel. Here to help me (Jack) talk about Solenoid is professional Romanian Alexandru Constantin of the B...
Mar 23, 2025•2 hr 10 min•Ep. 126
The Raft is an extremely funny micronovel by Phil Rot, Philip Roth's ghost-operated online nom de plume. You (yes, you, the one reading right now) should buy and read it. Buy The Raft on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DQ5PV8BX Phil's Book Recommendations The Amazonian Uteroboscus - BL Overman Behead all Satans - NMN-DR The Call of Horror series - Frank Gardner Keller Memento: 25 Years of David H Keller - David H Keller Improvidence - David Herod Incel - ARX-Han Bumper Crop - Joe R Lansdale ...
Mar 16, 2025•1 hr 45 min•Ep. 128
Ed returns for an episode! Leo Van is an engineer-turned-shaman who knows some of Ed and my (Jack's) friends. In this book, published shortly before the 2024 American Presidential election, Van analyses Trump from the perspective of Amazonian shamanism, describing him as an unwitting 'brujo rojo', a practitioner of both black and white magic. I was initially reticent to cover a book that felt too topical, but the shamanic angle sucked me in. Buy Trump: Modern Shaman: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0...
Mar 09, 2025•1 hr 18 min•Ep. 125
Lewis Woolston is a cryptid (Australian) living in Facebookistan (South Australia) who has written two lovely collections of short stories, Remembering the Dead and Other Stories and The Last Free Man and Other Stories . This episode, we talked about Remembering the Dead, regret, ageing, loss, family, NA, and more. Read his books, they're great. Buy Remembering the Dead from Truth Serum Press, if you're a true Aussie patriot: https://truthserumpress.net/catalogue/fiction/remembering-the-dead/ Bu...
Mar 02, 2025•1 hr 22 min•Ep. 127
Hans-Herman Hoppe is a German-born economist of the Austrian School, an anarcho-capitalist, professor emeritus of economics at the University of Nevada and, as the title of this book would suggest, not a democracy enjoyer. Considered a seminal work by, among others, NRx luminaries such as Mencious Moldbug and Nick Land, Democracy: The God That Failed offers a praxeological justification for why all states are bad, but democracies are worse than monarchies. For this episode, we were lucky to be j...
Feb 23, 2025•3 hr 56 min•Ep. 121
Incurable Graphomania is a collection of bleakly funny short stories by Anna Krivalopova ( not Anna Khachyan). We got to talk about Russia, being talked to by telecommunication towers, cat food, grindcore, and much more, before she had to make a sudden and mysterious exit--intriguing, elusive, maintaining frame. You should buy Incurable Graphomania: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CCW2HGMX Anna on Twitter: @AnaKrivolapova Apocalypse Confidential: https://apocalypse-confidential.com/ VERY IMPORTANT I...
Feb 16, 2025•2 hr 27 min•Ep. 124
Without sound money, governments can expand the supply of cuckbucks (fiat currency) willy-nilly. In Fiat Food (2023), Lysiak details how monetary expansion has led to the American 'fiat food' diet of vegetable-based, food-adjacent slop. And how do we escape from the clutches of fiat food? With Bitcoin and red meat. Shout out to orangepill luminary Saifedean Ammous' publishing house The Saif House for publishing this book. We're brilliant minds, so we managed to mispronounce 'Saifedean' for the e...
Feb 09, 2025•5 hr 6 min•Ep. 120
Adem is an author and audio documentarian (I guess?) whose work is characterised by, above all, a bracing honesty. Mixtape Hyperborea (2023) is a novel about high school, and Slacker Genesis is an audio collage (for lack of a better term) about relationships, faith, hypocrisy, friendship, failure and forgiveness. Both works are well worth checking out. Mixtape Hyperborea: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BW32CX2G? Slacker Genesis: https://www.patreon.com/StaticBlue VERY IMPORTANT INFORMATION Jack has...
Feb 02, 2025•1 hr 54 min•Ep. 123
Men won't commit and women don't need to accept this. Why? They have the power of the pussy. Relationship books for women are a whole lot less gross than the ones for men, but also much less funny. VERY IMPORTANT INFORMATION Jack has published a novel called Tower ! Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Tower-Jack-BC-ebook/dp/B0CM5P9N9M/ref=monarch_sidesheet The first nine chapters of Tower are available for free here: jackbc.substack.com Our Patreon: www.patreon.com/TheBookClubfromHell Jack's Substack...
Jan 26, 2025•2 hr 34 min•Ep. 119
Matt Pegas is an author, podcaster and soon-to-be publisher. We talked about his books Dragon Day and The Black Album, about order from chaos, about being and becoming, about Alexander Dugin, about Ernst Junger, about the occult, about the importance of ritual, and much more. Matt's Books: Dragon Day: https://www.amazon.com/Dragon-Day-Matthew-Pegas-ebook/dp/B0967PF1JF The Black Album: https://www.amazon.com/Black-Album-Matthew-Pegas-ebook/dp/B0CY8PNKG7 Matt's Podcasts: Strange Flows ( https://ma...
Jan 19, 2025•1 hr 59 min•Ep. 120
Erowid.org is the Internet's most comprehensive and fun encyclopaedia of recreational drugs. If you aren't ordering research chemicals from a shady online Russian pharmacy and using them to commune with tree demons at a bush doof, then you aren't really living. VERY IMPORTANT INFORMATION Jack has published a novel called Tower ! Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Tower-Jack-BC-ebook/dp/B0CM5P9N9M/ref=monarch_sidesheet The first nine chapters of Tower are available for free here: jackbc.substack.com ...
Jan 12, 2025•1 hr 50 min•Ep. 118
We look back on 2024. NB: during the Patreon shoutouts, I can't remember if I gave a shoutout to Robert/Fake Gamer Boy. Shout out to Robert! Also shout out to Trent, our grouchiest OG. We're going to be taking a break for a few weeks, new episodes again from mid-January 2025. VERY IMPORTANT INFORMATION Jack has published a novel called Tower ! Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Tower-Jack-BC-ebook/dp/B0CM5P9N9M/ref=monarch_sidesheet The first nine chapters of Tower are available for free here: jackb...
Dec 22, 2024•3 hr 3 min•Ep. 122
Carl Schmitt was a German legal philosopher who is probably most famous for joining the Nazi Party in 1933. He's also extremely influential in legal and political philosophy, and only growing more so, on both the illiberal left and right. He remains one of the most interesting critics of liberalism, and we were lucky enough to have Dr Jon Wittrock of the University of Malmö join us for this episode, leading us through the foundations of Schmitt's thought. Turns out, there's a lot more to Schmitt...
Dec 15, 2024•1 hr 49 min•Ep. 114
