Synopses & Reviews
You can't escape him. He swerves in and out of your life as if effortlessly walking through a crowded restaurant. He's a passive-aggressive master. He's as undetectable as a whisper and as effective as a tiny toxic pill. You probably went to school with him, and he knows everything you've done-every foolish secret ambition you've nurtured, everyone you wish you'd never slept with, every lame, fleeting trend you've embraced. The Underminer throws you into a spiral of self-doubt each time you see him. But...the Underminer is your friend. With this book, Mike Albo and Virginia Heffernan channel this hilarious and mysterious evil that we all have encountered. Through 15 years of booming successes and miserable failures, they pursue this powerful "friend" as he slowly and relentlessly dismantles the life of a nameless victim. Here is the subtle slayer of your hopes, the tactful destroyer of your dreams: the Underminer.
Review
"The narrator of Mike Albo's new novel is a psychological predator of the highest order...[Drawn with] sharpness and hilarity." Boston Globe
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"Albo's jokes punch hard." Entertainment Weekly
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"It's classified as fiction, but anyone who's lived it will know the novel is anything but imagined." Washington Post
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As seen in The New Yorker (December Fiction issue) and heard on NPR's "This Amerrican Life," here's a poison valentine from that friend who always knows just how to pull the rug out from under you. "Pitch-perfect...The Underminer is a compressed comic classic of New York, a kind of anti-E.B. White fable...Nasty. But fun. And very funny. I started out dog-earing the pages of the galley I laughed most at, but then ended up dog-earing most of the book...I really want all New Yorkers, especially the Underminers among us, to read it."(New York Observer)
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"Pitch-perfect...The Underminer is a compressed comic classic of New York...Nasty. But fun. And very funny." New York Observer
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"...a poet's ear, a novelist's eye and a speed freak's tongue, Albo is downtown's fast-talking monologist...a wizard with words and refreshingly sweet..." Paper Magazine
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"Albo's jokes punch hard."(Entertainment Weekly)
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"A novel masquerading as a self-help book--or is it a self-help book masquerading as a novel?" USA Today
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"Pitch-perfect...The Underminer is a compressed comic classic of New York.Nasty. But fun. And very funny."
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"It's classified as fiction, but anyone whos lived it will know the novel is anything but imagined."
(Washington Post)
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"A treasure...You'll laugh. You'll cry. You'll wince with recognition...Wickedly funny...richly detailed and pitch perfect." Chicago Tribune
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"Hilarious and sick, The Underminer is one of those books that makes you insane with rage and laughter. I loved it more than I hate people like this." Margaret Cho
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"Whether your Underminer is an actual nemesis or merely the voice of a particularly ornery self-loathing, Albo and Heffernan have done humankind the favor of nailing the bastard, with wit and style in excelsis-cringier than a ninth grade PE humiliation, more scouring, compassionate and incisively lamenting of the human condition than a four-day acid trip hosted by Oprah, and hilariously upbraiding of pretentious trends in a way that will make you involuntarily blow your soy-chai frappaccino through your nose. I can think of no more priceless stocking-stuffer for that special insensitive someone. The Underminer beats a bucket of Paxil, six months of therapy and an exorcism-it bestows the healing gift of revenge." Cintra Wilson
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"Fascinating... enormously funny... perfectly pitched...The Underminer is a small voice whispering in your ear, 'Read me.'" Newsday
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"...a hyperactive monologist with a gift for capturing the most mundane sound bites in modern conversation and juxtaposing them..." New York Press
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"Albos jokes punch hard."
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"Everyone has one: the 'friend' who somehow manages to turn every compliment into an incredibly subtle insult...Addictive." New York Post (Hot List)
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"The ultimate satirist of the downtown New York social landscape...The Underminer displays an astonishing capacity for condescension." New York Times
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"Rapid-fire rants, skits and anecdotes, [Albo is] a sharp satirist." Pittsburgh Tribune
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"I started laughing with the first sentence, didn't stop until the last sentence and then, randomly, for the next week, the slightest reminder of one of the zillion funny lines in The Underminer would set me off again." Malcolm Gladwell
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"Diabolical...it makes you chuckle, but it also makes you squirm." Arizona Republic
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"Scathingly funny...It's an era made for the Underminer." Philadelphia Inquirer
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"A treasure...wickedly funny...Studded with comic gems that beg to be read out loud."
Chicago Tribune
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"An insincere, name-dropping predator with a rise so meteoric that 'you' feel like crawling into your sad little apartment and eating gallons of ice cream right out of the carton while sniffling over reruns of old Bette Davis movies."
New York Times Book Review
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"A character that is so malicious, so insensitive and sadistic, that we can only gape horror-struck as every venomous phrase rolls off her tongue."
Rocky Mountain News
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"A psychological predator of the highest order. A viper cloaked in velvet. The Shaquille O'Neal of schadenfreude."
Boston Globe
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"An ego-skewering, passive-aggressive blowhard of indeterminate gender, surfing annoyingly along the breaking waves of pop and consumer culture--from dot-com to New Age, from hip-hop to a yurt in Afghanistan--always on top and armed with a put-down."
New York Times
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"The 'friend' who somehow manages to turn every compliment into an incredibly subtle insult, thus making you wonder whether you are truly the most neurotic person in all of Manhattan--or if your friend is just, well, evil."
New York Post
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"The person in your life who always does things before you, better than you, and far more profitably than you. The kind of person who manages to express that she cares about you in a way that makes you want to kill yourself."
Chicago Sun-Times
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"The Underminer is a small voice whispering in your ear, 'Read me.'"
Newsday
Synopsis
Successful, gorgeous, and beloved by everyone you know, the Underminer remembers your every foolish ambition and humiliating mistake--and never fails to remind you. The Underminer makes you feel suicidal. But the Underminer is your friend...Mike Albo and Virginia Heffernan do us all a public service by capturing the elusive evils of an age-old archetype. To understand and resist
your toxic friend, you need
The Underminer.About the Author
Mike Albo is a writer and performer who has brought his comedic monologues to venues all over the country and abroad. His first novel,
Hornito, was published in 2000.
Virginia Heffernan, who writes with Albo for his performances, is a television critic for the New York Times.