Appointment in Samarra is an unfortunate title for a novel that’s about nothing that the title might suggest, until you read the epigraph, from the play Sheppey by W. Somerset Maugham, and you realize that the title really means Appointment with Death. The main character, Julian English, the ne’er-do-well son of a rich, morally-uptight, hack of a small-town doctor, is a disappointment to his parents, and gets deeper and deeper into a hole, through his own doing—through alcoholism, philandering, and fiscal profligacy—until he brings on his demise. “If ever there was a man in a jam, he was it,” writes the author, John O’Hara.

Julian’s wife, Caroline Walker, the belle of her generation in Gibbsville, PA, falls for Julian when he’s young and charming enough to gloss over his rakish ways. He is a man who, “as good as he had been [with women], is not wholly trusted and liked by men.” The story starts with Julian and Caroline settled into their life, fish of the highest possible pedigree in this small pond of a town. Julian runs the local Cadillac dealership, badly, but thanks to connections, does well enough, and spends his weekends at the country club, exercising his clout over social climbers. Caroline is happy to be on his arm, and hopes for children, but wants Julian to stop getting drunk and embarrassing them.

The book immerses us in small-town, East Coast America almost a century ago. The story ends just after Christmas 1930, at the tail-end of Prohibition. O’Hara basically admitted that, to write the book, he drew on real experience, growing up in WASPish Pottsville, PA. His father, the town’s Irish Catholic doctor, died young, plunging the family into poverty. Catholics are second-class citizens in the book, although, unlike Jews, they’re admitted to the country club, and ultimately topple Julian, after he throws a drink into the face of a rich, blowhard Catholic who has a crush his wife. Neither WASPs nor Catholics, if they’re wealthy, come off well in the book.

The novel’s 270 pages make for very juicy reading. The exposition is gossipy. You learn these stuffy people’s secrets. When drunk, they get up to mischief. When the book came out in 1934, it got criticized for being racy. It has a couple of very sexy scenes. The dialogue is superb. O’Hara—who published over 400 short stories, and more stories in The New Yorker than any other writer—had a stupendous ear and actually championed dialogue as the most effective literary technique for “produc[ing] true characters.” There’s a scene at a speakeasy, where O’Hara has all these different characters of different social classes, and in different states of inebriation, talking back and forth to each other. It’s unparalleled. And, it moves the story along.

The book switches masterfully between omniscient narrator and the perspective of different principal characters, Julian, Caroline, and Al Grecco, a small-time mobster, who supplies the liquor to these upscale lushes. Perhaps O’Hara’s characterization of Caroline is as impressive as that of Julian. She’s tolerant, intelligent, and feels deeply, especially in love. We see her with three or four suitors before Julian.

Some false notes pop up near the end, but minor stuff. Something cool: the characters mention F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway, both of whom ended up liking the book. Hemingway loved it.

O’Hara wrote Appointment in Samarra, his debut novel, at twenty-eight, and it might be his greatest single achievement—at least stylistically—although he wrote seventeen or eighteen novels, a few of which garnered big awards. He finished it in six months, writing two to three hours a night, five nights a week, in the Pickwick Arms Hotel in Manhattan, while hanging out in saloons and having tea with Dorothy Parker, another New Yorker legend, during the day. He first envisioned the book as four separate short stories, each one revolving around a different character, but aborted that idea, and started over. Good decision.

Appointment in Samarra is literature at its very best, without being heavy reading at all. Like almost all great books, a film could never do it justice; too many scrumptious stories packed into the exposition. To sum it up in one phrase: It’s the story of a spoiled-child-turned-careless-man who suffocates under the stigma of increasingly appalling social blunders. It’s timeless, I’m telling you.

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Jim Carroll—son of a conservative Irish-American bartender who fought in World War II—stood out as a basketball star, delinquent, drug addict, poet, memoirist, performer, and New York cultural figure.

Following the Beats—Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and William S. Burroughs—Carroll had big shoes to fill. Like Kerouac and Ginsberg, he did his best work when young. Like Burroughs, drugs probably enhanced his work, but with diminishing returns.

Below, we start with the poetry—what he published first. Then The Basketball Diaries, which made him famous. And finally Forced Entries, which, in my opinion, contains his best sustained stretches of writing.

Hope you all enjoy.

Thanks for reading and watching, good people.

John

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Jim Carroll made his name with The Basketball Diaries, but his second memoir, Forced Entries: The Downtown Diaries, is the better book, showing more literary range. If he hadn’t spread himself so thin—or burned himself out with drugs, which may have fuelled his early work—he might have gone on to produce a masterpiece.

On Forced Entries:

On The Basketball Diaries:

Thanks for sticking around, good people.

John

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Why Teach? comes highly recommended by , who reads everything—from classics to fanfiction—and writes simply and intelligently about it. She called Why Teach? “a realist novel that doesn’t resemble any other realist novel.” That sold me.

About halfway through the novel, when I was about to give up, , Editor-in-Chief of The Metropolitan Review, used Substack Notes to thank Kanakia for recommending Why Teach?, saying he “really enjoyed” it. So I bore down and finished it.

The novel’s protagonist and narrator, William Able, 26, returns to his hometown in Kansas after college and gets a job teaching English at his high school alma mater. His initial plans to go to grad or law school and perhaps work at his father’s law firm get sidelined. Thanks to the intervention of football prospect Bryce, the little brother of his best friend, “Mr. A” establishes rapport with the jocks of his “majority-minority” school. “Be your best selves,” he urges them, and they appreciate him. Their respect for him and his love for the literature he teaches keep him in the classroom. The novel itself opens at the start of his fourth year, when he is up for tenure. Bryce has just died in a car accident. It’s here that Will Able’s self-questioning about his career begins in earnest.

My biggest qualm arises from the novel’s absence of any deeply felt relationships. No character other than the narrator came alive for me. The backstory with Bryce and Mr. Able, clearly meant to give Why Teach? emotional weight, seemed skimpy—more told than shown. Able’s relationships with his students, his father, his townie friends, his fellow teachers, and his romantic flings felt rote—as if borrowed from popular entertainment. The exception, a chapter in which Will Able and Julia, his best friend’s fiancée, flirt with an affair, lifted off the page and showed the literary heights Shull is capable of.

What makes the novel unique—as Kanakia’s review points out—is how Shull uses his protagonist’s “ambivalence” about his career to move the story along. The novel’s unequivocal villain, Mrs. Hirsche, is the high school’s self-righteous yet shoddily read Head of Literacy, who forbids the use of novels, plays, and poetry in class in favor of “district-provided test-prep materials.” Shull invents a book, Stories Don’t Matter in the Real World, by William Gramley, skillfully working it into the novel, as Able rebels against the “new curriculum.”

If Able’s relationships with people don’t come off, his relationship with literature does—especially with Shakespeare’s plays. The book is astute about the Bard’s continuing relevance even to apathetic teenagers. Mrs. Hirsche asks him, “What’s more important to you, the material or the students? … Are you teaching for them, or are you teaching for you?” The book raises engaging questions about how to teach high school students to read rigorously without belittling or boring them.

Shull misses an opportunity by not pinning down when exactly his story takes place. Able appears to be a technological hold-out—still owning a flip phone, having “red-enveloped DVDs coming once or twice a week” in the mail, and watching “late-night reruns of last-century sit-coms.” And yet his friends are glued to their phones and texting while they drive. The best realist novels serve as artifacts, locking us in a time and place. Rather than Why Teach? leading me to ponder how we once lived, I was left wondering whether Shull misplaced his period props.

In his acknowledgements, Shull thanks his developmental editor, who advised him to take 20K words out of an earlier version. In my opinion, removing another 20K would have hit the spot. Too much, “I ate a ham sandwich while watching television”—that sort of thing. I think novelists have to use character downtime to expose psychological depth. The 40-page stretch that almost made me give up describes Able’s near-paralyzing depression early in the school year. It paralyzed the book. Shull could have accomplished the same in four artful pages. Thanks to Barkan’s Substack Note, I persevered, and Shull rewarded me ten pages later with that scene of Able almost cuckolding his best friend.

Why Teach?, more than realist fiction, is a novel of ideas—or rather a novel of a single idea: Is teaching the classics to high school students worth it, and for whom, and how and why? The book would have worked better as a short novella or a long story. Shull shows himself a talented, if inconsistent writer, with occasional flashes of brilliance. Near the end, Shull puts Able in a hot tub with two scantily-clad women and has his mind riff on the meaning of the word “ambivalence.” It’s another stunning set-piece, but it’s couched in a scene of trite actions and reactions from the other characters involved—a privileged and stupid young lawyer and his mindless squeezes with dollar signs for eyes.

“I cannot describe to you how artful this book is,” wrote Kanakia in her review of Why Teach?. The book contains artful scenes, pulls the reader along after the midpoint, and its central question matters, but I wouldn’t anoint it. To revitalize book culture—a pet topic among Substackers—the quality of independently published books has to far surpass what legacy publishing offers. Presenting decent books as excellent doesn’t do anyone any favors.

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, author of Degas at the Gas Station, is the son of a psychoanalyst who married the daughter of a psychoanalyst and then, after an eight-year bout with blood cancer, died young, at 52, leaving Beller fatherless at ten years old. All his life Beller has dealt with, as he writes, “an absence that could not be challenged, only endured.” His father’s life remains forever elusive to him—a kind of epic cut short: born and raised in Vienna, came to the U.S. as a refugee, at sixteen, to escape the Holocaust, not without close calls, only to die before he realized himself personally and professionally.

This heartbreak infuses the entire book and comes to greatest poignancy near the end, when Beller plays with his six-year-old daughter Evangeline, brings her to “that highest plane of unbridled laughter,” and is suddenly struck by what it would have been like for his father, suffering from a terminal illness, to play with him and make him laugh like that, and to know that soon “that laugher would be ended.”

Degas at the Gas Station also touches on growing up on the Upper West Side of Manhattan when not only rich people lived there, and on being among “the last generation of kids who were allowed to roam around the city with relative autonomy,” even at eleven years old. It’s about how an apartment can resemble a long-term romantic relationship because of “the many layers of life” that exist in them, about how “a place to live is not a job… [b]ut…both [are] identities.” It’s about being a non-religious Jew. He writes: “I root for Jewishness like I root for the Knicks.” It’s about Central Park, squabbles with neighbors, and getting punched in the face in the street—that happens three times in the book, or perhaps twice, and once in his previous book, Lost in the Game, which also impressed me.

New Orleans also makes a few appearances in Degas at the Gas Station. Beller teaches creative writing there. But New York outshines it.

Beller tells us about how cities change like children grow: “Nothing happens, and then, all of a sudden, it already has;” about how “[c]hildren…bludgeon you with the relentless reality of time.” Evangeline, his “furious little lollipop of a daughter,” is the most delightful character in the book. She comes across like children do in J.D. Salinger stories; think “For Esme—with Love and Squalor.” Beller wrote a book about Salinger, The Escape Artist. He’s had an impressive literary career: staff writer at The New Yorker, author of seven books, ran the literary magazine and then press, Open City, for twenty years.

Degas at the Gas Station is a memoir in the tradition of Speak, Memory by Vladimir Nabokov and Burning the Days by James Salter—episodic, meandering. The reader must absorb and assimilate the anecdotes, riffs, and emotion without the help of a clear narrative line. Beller will only do so much work for the reader. The chapters—many of which also work as stand-alone essays—are reflective and associative in nature, with lots of lateral jumps and insightful asides, and end like poems.

If I have a bone to pick with the book, near the end, four cultural essays undercut the quiet but real narrative momentum. I believe Beller could have included the autobiographical material from those pieces, without the magazine-like cultural commentary.

Beller writes, “I do believe in magical realism, by which I mean the magic of realism—where you take the empirical and make it into a story, such that it begins to levitate, and in this way you have a kind of mysticism.”

If you read Degas at the Gas Station with your full attention, if you shut out the world around you and slip into the rhythms of Beller’s prose, you’ll experience some mystical moments.

In one, he writes about his sexual awakening. It’s so good I did a separate video on it:

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The video version of the above review includes more:

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In the middle of 2025, , run by two passionate, young writers, announced their plans to publish only fiction starting this January, while paying writers 200 dollars per short story and 50 dollars per piece of microfiction. The announcement went viral. Before publishing a single story, Strange Pilgrims had over 24,000 subscribers.

Writers are so eager to make literary fiction popular and profitable again that they’ll beat the drum for—and even sometimes help finance—projects that have not yet proven themselves.

based in Edinburgh, Scotland, overseen by writer, filmmaker, and academic , received a wave of support on Substack in December when Dematagoda announced that the press, founded in 2019, had plans to scale up to publishing four books a year, adding a Hyperidean Press Novel Prize, and giving higher advances to authors. To help finance all this, Dematagoda laid out a new subscription model and encouraged our support.

Unlike Strange Pilgrims, Hyperidean Press has a track record, having already published eight books. Two of those books—a novel and a collection of essays—are Dematagoda’s. In the current world of legacy publishing—with its narrow-minded political views and tendency toward moral posturing—we need free thinkers to start and direct presses. If the inspiration to start a press comes from an author who, in the process of independently publishing his own work, also publishes writers he admires and respects, and manages to create a community of writers and an aesthetic which bucks the system, then fantastic, in my opinion.

Instead of becoming a paid subscriber, I decided to buy Dematagoda’s first novel, Horizontal Rain, published by Hyperidean in 2020. On the press website, he lists some of his favorite novels, but I figured his own book would give a better idea of his tastes and interests. As readers, what can we expect from the authors he publishes? And as writers, might he be interested in our work?

Horizontal Rain showed me that Dematagoda’s a very skilled writer, with legitimate literary pretensions. He has a great ear for dialogue, can lift off on flights of inspired prose, can be experimental, but also adhere to more traditional storytelling forms and devices. He’s versatile. He’s so skilled that at times he can almost gloss over where his storytelling falters. To me, the art of fiction is storytelling. In Horizontal Rain, where art isn’t happening, Dematagoda steps in with artistry to dazzle us.

Reading Dematagoda in Horizontal Rain is like watching a very talented ballplayer. You stay to the end of the match, not because you really care how it turns out, but because of the flashes of brilliance that Dematagoda reveals here and there. He’s a pleasure to watch at work.

The unnamed protagonist, a long-suffering Romantic—with a capital R—pickled by booze, anti-depressants and dilettantism, sleeps with and then becomes obsessed with Clara, a woman he hardly knows. That’s the story. The narrator second-guesses everything he does and doesn’t do in love, is impulsive when he does act, and then laments his decisions afterwards. The book is comic in this sense.

As the protagonist and his roommate Robert discuss art and the human condition—especially as they relate to horny and sensitive intellectual men—, they code-switch between the vernacular of their working class roots and the higher registers acquired in the process of getting their PhDs.

In Horizontal Rain, Dematagoda writes men much better than he writes women. Clara, the protagonist’s obsession, comes across as multiple characters, multiple women, a kind of unfocused composite, which maybe speaks to the protagonist, through whose perspective the story is told. The end becomes a kind of hallucinatory collage. Dematagoda hedges his bets narratively and instead puts his expressive talents on display.

I’d say that Dematagoda is interested in what most conventional presses aren’t—male points of view, even when getting graphic about sex. He can also write a good brawl. Expressive talent—linguistic fireworks, let’s say—matter to him, as does the clash between the working class and the bourgeoisie. As does bohemian life. Although a man of color—born in Sri Lanka before moving with his family to Edinburgh—he does not bang that drum.

Here’s something worrisome though: Twenty pages into the story, I encountered a seven-page scene with 15 errata. I counted them. In the 200-page book, there might be a total of a hundred. If you are out to create a beautiful object, and clearly Dematagoda is gifted in this department—the Hyperidean catalogue has a distinctive look, the paper is of good quality, the book and type design are tasteful—why be so sloppy editing the galleys? Why leave such an amateurish impression?

Publishing and championing the work of others is not something to take lightly. It’s time-consuming. You have to upload your writers’ books to the various platforms, put in the meta-data, proofread galleys—well!—do the accounting, reach out to book stores, book sellers, blurbists, handle the social media, read queries, work line by line with the authors whose books are chosen, and they can be touchy. And there’s book design, too. All of this has to be done as a labor of love until that one breakout book comes, if it ever comes, to make the business even slightly profitable. How many people with great literary taste—and Dematagoda clearly has it—are willing to do a job that requires so much self-effacement, economic sacrifice, attention to minutia, and practicality? Practicality too, because, to keep your writers happy, I don’t think you can be anti-capitalist, anti-establishment, or anti Amazon. You have to sell books; otherwise it’s a vanity project.

Anyway, I hope Damatagoda succeeds with Hyperidean Press. We could use taste like his at the helm. I just hope his taste is paired with a true vocation for publishing and promoting the work of others.

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Jim Carroll, in The Basketball Diaries, is a mean, resentful, and hardened Holden Caulfield, who writes about his experiences of New York City from 1963 to 1966—between the ages of thirteen and sixteen—when he fell into delinquency and heroin addiction.

The book might have the best male masturbation scene ever written, which I read at the end—YouTube censors be damned.

Wishing you all a happy and prosperous 2026.

Cheers,

John

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While Shakespeare doesn’t appear in the following rant, King James certainly does. Both continued to produce at the highest level late in their careers. So what’s their secret?

Because the topic at hand is creative longevity, I originally used the following thumbnail (the quote is LeBron’s):

In the end, though the quote is crucial, my face is less important than King James’s and King William’s.

For those of us aiming to produce stellar, relevant artistic work well into our later years, LeBron’s insight only needs a small tweak to resonate with writers.

I bare my soul in all these videos, but perhaps especially this one:

Thanks for sticking around, good people.

John

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The Fuck Business, by Michael Troy (clearly a pseudonym), might be the most nakedly honest book about sex that I’ve ever read.

It even outstrips Pimp by Iceberg Slim, who fronts as much as he tells it straight.

Troy, on the other hand, is a true sexual adventurer. His exploits led to casualties, of course. He might be the chief one.

What a shame that the book got pulled before publication. Let’s hope some brave press picks it up.

Anyone who can live at the extremes and write honestly about it deserves a platform and readers.

For now, here’s an inside look at an illuminating book:

These days, a book doesn’t have to be racy to get a writer in trouble. I explain, in The Republic of Letters, what happened after publishing my own book:

The Republic of Letters

How My Book Cost Me My Job

Dear Republic…

Read more

6 months ago · 17 likes · 5 comments · The Republic of Letters and John Julius Reel

Thanks for sticking around.

John

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On the Road as inspired typing… Salinger as a masterful one-note Johnny… Ann Karenina as the perfect novel… and Beethoven as a bad musician, but a genius…

All of this discussed, with the help of the great Leonard Bernstein, on a bright sunny day in a Sevillian park, with the Guadalquivir River just a stone’s throw away.

What more can you ask for from an old-school booktuber?

Thanks for sticking around, good people… Gracias por seguir aquí, buena gente.

John

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We cover:

· The founding of Tortoise Books

· The shortcomings of legacy publishing

· Why Amazon can be more supportive of small presses than many indie bookstores

· The relentless work of selling books—and why authors, not publishers, should lead that effort

· The pitfalls of self-promotion

· Why, for Jerry, accounting comes before publicity

· How print-on-demand makes independent publishing economically feasible

· The mindset required to read submissions

· The frustration authors feel when they don’t receive feedback

· How being a writer informs Jerry’s work as an editor

· How reading tastes evolve over time

· The Chicago literary scene

· How the Twelve Steps help center us in our vocations

An hour and a half zipped by—I hope it does for you too.

Thanks for sticking around.

John

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Today I’m dropping the third and final part of my series on the controversial writer, Chuck Palahniuk.

In this video, I dig into the moral implications of his work, as Palahniuk himself laid out on the The Joe Rogan Experience in 2018. By jiggling our moral compass, by turning himself into “a degraded monster,” Palahniuk transcends shock and vulgarity to create art.

His classic story “Guts” disgusts us, but not gratuitously, in my opinion.

Thanks for sticking around.

John

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Today, Book Rants posts its first-ever remote interview, featuring special guest, Sam Kahn, a man committed to what he calls “aperture” in the literary world.

We talked for an hour and twenty minutes and could easily have continued for two more. In addition to his novel Henchman (which I reviewed here) and his literary journal, The Republic of Letters, we covered topics such as: hearing voices when inspired; the magic of intentionality; Sam’s inability to edit his own work; how writing a novel can be like a sea voyage or like listening to a staticky radio broadcast; how writing talent might be nothing more than a gift for honesty; how fiction struggles to triumph on Substack; how the amount of interesting writing might be infinite; how memoir can be fascinatingly bad in a way that fiction can’t be; Sam’s belief that Substack is “a museum without walls,” how, when young, we all get bogged down by self-absorption, dreams of grandeur, and envy; and finally a baseball metaphor to close, about writers who swing for the fences, but end up popping up.

I’m afraid that the number of interesting podcast episodes is infinite, too — but not as interesting as this one. Check it out.

Thanks for sticking around.

John

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Is there a place in literature for writing that makes us want to retch, wince, or look away?

William Burroughs’ Naked Lunch, with its brutal descriptions of homosexual sex, Knut Hamsun’s Hunger, in which the narrator considers eating his own finger, John Fante’s Ask the Dust, in which Arturo Bandini pushes his lover’s face into the sand after having sex with her on the beach, or Hubert Selby Jr.’s “Tralala,” with perhaps the most brutal rape scene ever published—all qualify as literature, yet don’t exactly provide a pleasant reading experience.

I categorize Chuck Palahniuck’s short story “Guts,” about the grotesque and shameful consequences of extreme masturbation, in this same tradition of writers taking readers to the darkest of places by using scenes of graphic sex, violence, and abuse.

Are such scenes gratuitous? Why or why not? Are readers less tolerant of such writing nowadays? What can writers expect from the average current-day reader of literary fiction?

Palahniuk speaks provocatively about all this in Episode #1158 of The Joe Rogan Experience. In the following video, I cull out the most interesting clips from that podcast and then add commentary:

Two weeks ago, in part one of my three-part series on Palahniuk, I focused on his singular way of producing his fiction—a method probably not taught in any MFA program, but from which all writers can learn:

Before I make part three public, I hope to publish a video interview with the polyfacetic Sam Kahn. Three days ago, on August 8^th, The Republic of Letters published my review of Kahn’s excellent and highly original novel Henchman, currently being serialized on Substack. Kahn hopes Substack will eventually provide an alternative outlet for talented novelists who want to publish their work and find readers, but who have consistently bumped up against the gatekeepers of legacy publishing—which, as I write in the review, is “committee-run, set in its ways, and too beleaguered by the new order to give literature its due.”

Tomorrow at noon, Sam and I will talk. It will be the first remote interview I’ve ever done on Book Rants. Kahn lives somewhere in Central Asia. I look forward to finding out exactly where, as well as learning more about his myriad projects and interests.

As for other news, in late August or early September, I will begin to serialize the audiobook of My Half Orange: A Story of Love and Language in Seville on Substack, narrated by the author—me. You’ll be able to buy the complete version—just under six hours of listening—at any audiobook retailer for a very affordable price.

Remember, you can manage your subscription here to choose which posts you want to receive. I don’t want to clutter your inbox; you should get only what you signed up for.

Thanks for sticking around.

John

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