Brilliant, Brilliant, Brilliant Brilliant Brilliant
Essays
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3.7 • 3 Ratings
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- $7.99
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- $7.99
Publisher Description
*National Bestseller*
"This is a funny and beautiful book. What a little bastard." --Russell Brand
"Every paragraph is like doing a shot with a friend. A double." --Caitlin Moran
Joel Golby's writing for Vice and The Guardian, with its wry observation and naked self-reflection, has brought him a wide and devoted following. Now, in his first book, he presents a blistering collection of new and newly expanded essays--including the achingly funny viral hit "Things You Only Know When Both Your Parents Are Dead." In these pages, he travels to Saudi Arabia, where he acts as a perplexed bystander at a camel pageant; offers a survival guide for the modern dinner party (i.e. how to tactfully escape at the first sign of an adult board game); and gets pitted head-to-head, again and again, with an unpredictable, unpitying subspecies of Londoner: the landlord.
Through it all, he shows that no matter how cruel the misfortune, how absurd the circumstance, there's always the soft punch of a lesson tucked within. This is a book for anyone who overshares, overthinks, has ever felt lost or confused--and who wants to have a good laugh about it.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Whether one takes a shine to Vice contributor Golby's breezy collection of essays will inevitably hinge upon how one feels about his employer and what its detractors would term a distinct brand of self-conscious hipster posturing. Wherever one stands, Golby's writing does not set itself apart from the expected Vice fare: profanity is employed liberally if not ostentatiously throughout, as are references to bodily fluids and controlled substances. He writes with unemotional ironic detachment about his dead parents ("Things You Only Know When Both Your Parents Are Dead"), but analyzes Rocky movies with seeming heart-on-sleeve sincerity; he also manages to write passionately about attempting to achieve his adolescent dream of fellating himself. In other essays, he simply comes off like an English Chuck Klosterman, writing with grating hyperbole about a number of pop culture subjects, including the evil inherent in the game Monopoly; a website called Twitch, where one watches people play video games; and, in a particularly overwritten entry, sex robots in Barcelona. Golby isn't without talent, but his flamboyant attitude can't make up for the severely limited palette of his subject matter and tone.
