I Hate the Internet

"This succinct, surprising, infinitely self-knowing book is the Infinite Jest of the Twitter age all the same. Oh, and it's the Kurt Vonnegut, hell, the Swift and Voltaire of the Twitter age too, why not? He has come up with a satirical novel that, at least while you're immersed in it, makes everyone else's novels look like the blinkered artefacts of the bloated, tech-addled, smilingly exploitative western culture that he so nimbly takes to bits. It's vicious. It's a hoot." -- Dominic Maxwell * The Times *
Could we have an American Houellebecq? Jarett Kobek might come close, in the fervor of his assault on sacred cows of our own secretly-Victorian era, even if some of his implicit politics may be the exact reverse of the Frenchman's. I just got an early copy of his newest, I Hate The Internet and devoured it - he's as riotous as Houellebecq, and you don't need a translator, only fireproof gloves for turning the pages -- Jonathan Lethem
This book has soul as well as nerve ... My advice? Log off Twitter for a day. Pick this up instead. * New York Times *
"[A] thrillingly funny and vicious anatomy of hi-tech culture and the modern world in general ... Kobek has been compared to the French enfant terrible Michel Houellebecq by none other than Jonathan Lethem, the Brooklyn-based writer of "good novels", though this book's cleverly casual style, apparently eschewing literary artifice, reminded me much more of Kurt Vonnegut. But it's the enraged comedy of its cultural diagnosis that really drives the reader onwards. There are so many brilliant one-liner definitions that it's hard not to keep quoting them ... If Ambrose Bierce woke up today from suspended animation and decided to write a sequel to his Devil's Dictionary in the form of a sort-of fiction, it would look a bit like this. And when a bad novel is this good, who needs a good one?" -- Steven Poole * Guardian *
This book is an all-consuming, omniscient rant that rips into the zeitgeist turning all the bullshit and hypcrisy into the darkest, most cutting hilarity ever. No light escapes this beautiful black hole! -- Robin Ince
Jarett Kobek articulated things I'd been trying to understand but couldn't find the words to -- Stewart Lee