Awards
Winner of the 2001 Firecracker Alternative Book Award for Fiction.
Synopses & Reviews
Review
"...[S]ome of the most hilarious satires of feature magazine journalism around. Every fatuous Esquire magazine writer who's even contemplating boarding a freighter, befriending a working-class black woman, dropping a celebrity name or subjecting us to his narcissistic maunderings about life, death, identity and Cuban hookers should shrivel into a little gray lump at the very sight of this book -- so will someone please Fed Ex a box over to West 57th Street posthaste? Although the book belabors its running conceit that Pollack is preposterously successful in every aspect of life ("I Have Slept With 500 Women," a triumphant encounter with a beast know as "El Caballo de Sangre," friendships with JFK and Edmund Wilson, the worshipful endorsement of every oppressed minority, etc.), the dismal truth is that most journalists' egomaniacal fantasies really are this cheesy." Laura Miller, Salon.com
Synopsis
This collection of satirical essays by the wildly clever Neal Pollack was among the first books published by McSweeney's. The author fabricates for himself a super-inflated ego, and goes on to apply that persona's preposterously offensive and short-sighted opinions to issues ranging from race relations to wild teenagers, but more than anything else, to his own (albeit fictional) stunning accomplishments.