Jarett Kobek

What if you told the truth and the whole world heard you? Would you expect to be believed? What if you lived in a country swamped with Internet outrage? What if you were a woman living in a society that hated women? In this, his first full-length novel, Jarett Kobek answers the questions of our moment: Why do we live with rank misery seeping from the world's cellphones and computers? Why do we applaud the enrichment of tech CEOs at the expense of the weak and the powerless? Why are we giving away our intellectual property? Why is activism in the 21st Century nothing more than a series of morality lectures typed into devices built by slaves? Set in the San Francisco of 2013, down amongst the victims of a Silicon Valley bubble, I Hate the Internet offers a hilarious and obscene indictment of our online lives.

I Hate the Internet

In the summer of 1999, Mohamed Atta defended a master's thesis that critiqued the introduction of Western-style skyscrapers in the Middle East and called for the return of the "Islamic-Oriental city." Using this as a departure point, Jarett Kobek's novel ATTA offers a fictionalized psychedelic biography of Mohamed Atta that circles around a simple question: what if 9/11 was as much a matter of architectural criticism as religious terrorism? Following the development of a socially awkward boy into one of history's great villains, Kobek demonstrates the need for a new understanding of global terrorism. The second work, "The Whitman of Tikrit" is a radical reimagining of Saddam Hussein's last day before capture.

& the Whitman of Tikrit

Atta

When Adeline, a wealthy art student, chances upon a young man from the Midwest known only as Baby in a shady East Village squat, the two begin a fiery friendship that propels them through a decade of New York life. In the apartments and bars of downtown Manhattan, Adeline is Baby's guardian angel. She brings him home with her to Los Angeles, where Baby relishes ketamine-fueled clubbing nights and acid days, and he falls deep into the Club Kid twilight zone of sexual excess. As Adeline develops into the artist she never really expected to become, Baby faces his own desire for artistic expression and recognition.

A Novel

The Future Won't be Long

Dear Reader,
This is not the Zodiac speaking. The one thing that I ask of you is this, please read this book. It is called How to Find Zodiac. Being that this book is about the Zodiac, it offers a new suspect. The theory is probably correct. At the moment the theory is unproven. But the idea is a bomb waiting to go massive. Can you see the flaws in the hunting method or will you just agree and say case closed. Either way one thing is true. Zodiac can never look and seem the same after you read this book. It was written by Jarett Kobek.

How To Find Zodiac

It’s 1969. Evil lurks in California.

From a Napa County hippie child murder to Haight Street gang bangs to methamphetamine psychosis to the killing of Sharon Tate.

Here and now, in this place and this time, it’s all gone wrong.

And there’s something else, too.

Zodiac.

The Long Hunt for the Zodiac

Motor Spirit

'Brilliantly funny ... the best satire of our contemporary nightmare that you will ever see, and very possibly the last' Alan MooreIt's 2019 and America is ruled over by a billionaire reality TV star. Its media is owned by a transnational class of the shameless and the depraved. And its people have been silently robbed of their wealth, their dignity and their democracy. In this brave new world, going to see a superhero movie counts as activism, and arguing with the other serfs on social media is political engagement. BUT EVERYTHING'S FINE - as long as you never, ever ask yourself who makes money from the ticket sales and the ratings, or who owns Twitter. It's 2019 and Jarett Kobek has done the only thing a dissident American novelist can do in those circumstances: he's joined the party and written fantasy novel about an immortal fairy queen and a shadowy billionaire philanthropist sheikh called Dennis.Hilarious, provocative and unmissable, Only Americans Burn in Hell is the only novel for our certifiably insane times.

Only Americans Burn in Hell

Firebrand novelists Jarett Kobek tackles the previously untold history of a computer game said to corrupt England's youth.

Boss Fight Books #15

Soft & Cuddly

Io odio internet

20 years of life.

27,000 tweets.

171 pages of sympathy for the devil.

XXXTentacion Against the World

Do Every Thing Wrong!

Ich hasse dieses Internet. Ein nützlicher Roman

Ik haat internet

Odeio A Internet

A despairingly hilarious satire of the modern world, from #MeToo to Trump, by the bestselling author of I Hate the Internet.

A fictional picture of 21st century life with the Internet and its consequences on society, set in the San Francisco of 2013.

A Useful Novel Against Men, Money, and the Filth of Instagram

Odio Internet

“A brilliant re-creation of a disappeared New York of cheap rents, club kids and Bret Easton Ellis. . . . You can’t stop time’s passage, this absorbing novel reminds us. You can only find someone to love to help you survive it.” —Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal “Have you been pining for tales of drug-fueled big-city debauchery set in the pre-digital era, when MTV was king, people still used landlines and hookups were orchestrated on dance floors instead of dating apps? Look no further.” —The Washington Post “Hard not to recommend. . . . Full of delightfully cynical aphorisms. . . . At the heart of The Future Won’t Be Long is the friendship between Baby and Adeline—at once loving and destructive and convincingly drawn by Kobek.” —Kevin Nguyen, GQ.com A euphoric, provocative novel about friendship, sex, art, clubbing, and ambition set in 1980s and ’90s New York City, from the author of I Hate the Internet When Adeline, a wealthy art student, chances upon a young man from the Midwest known only as Baby in a shady East Village squat, the two begin a fiery friendship that propels them through a decade of New York life. In the apartments and bars of downtown Manhattan to the infamous nightclub The Limelight, Adeline is Baby’s guardian angel, introducing him to a city not yet overrun by gentrification. They live through an era of New York punctuated by the deaths of Warhol, Basquiat, Wojnarowicz, and Tompkins Square Park. Adeline is fiercely protective of Baby, even bringing him home with her to Los Angeles, but he soon takes over his own education. Once just a kid off the bus from Wisconsin, Baby relishes ketamine-fueled clubbing nights and acid days in LA, and he falls deep into the Club Kid twilight zone of sexual excess. As Adeline develops into the artist she never really expected to become and flees to the nascent tech scene in San Francisco, Baby faces his own desire for artistic expression and recognition. He must write his way out of clubbing life, and their friendship, an alliance that seemed nearly impenetrable, is tested and betrayed, leaving each unmoored as the world around them seems to be unraveling. Riotously funny and wise, The Future Won't Be Long is an ecstatic, propulsive novel coursing with a rare vitality, an elegy to New York and to the relationships that have the power to change—and save—our lives.

The Future Won't Be Long

«Internet era un’invenzione meravigliosa. Era una rete informatica che gli esseri umani usavano per ricordare ai loro simili che erano degli schifosi pezzi di merda». Adeline è una quarantacinquenne semifamosa per aver pubblicato un fumetto di successo negli anni Novanta. Vive a San Francisco. Invitata a parlare in un’università, finisce sotto attacco sui social network per aver «commesso l’unico peccato imperdonabile del ventunesimo secolo», ossia non rendersi conto che qualcuno la riprendeva mentre esprimeva quello che pensava. Bisogna tenere conto che Adeline 1) è una donna in una cultura che odia le donne, 2) è semifamosa e 3) ha espresso un’opinione poco popolare. E vive nell’era Internet. Adeline diventa così un trend su Twitter, e quindi se ne occupa la stampa, incapace di svolgere un lavoro più serio. Adeline diventa il bersaglio degli hater. E dagli insulti sessisti e razzisti, gli unici a guadagnarci sono Google, Facebook e Twitter, che vivono della pubblicità e dei contenuti creati dagli utenti, delle loro opinioni inutili, spesso ipocrite e compiaciute, sfruttate appieno per le inserzioni pubblicitarie che fruttano patrimoni enormi a degli «antisociali privi di eumelanina nello strato basale dell’epidermide» (ossia bianchi) come Mark Zuckerberg, Steve Jobs e pochi altri, signori feudali per i quali «le parole sono il grasso che olia gli ingranaggi del capitalismo»... Io odio Internet è un romanzo esilarante concepito da una mente geniale, un bestseller controcorrente che fa a pezzi tutti i grandi paradossi dell’era Internet. «Un’invettiva politica e culturale, un grido prolungato sul potere e sulla moralità nell’era globale. Uno sguardo dentro una mente vivace, in ebollizione. Questo libro ha un’anima, ma ha anche le palle... Il mio consiglio? Sconnettetevi da Twitter per un giorno. E leggete questo». «The New York Times» «Un’anatomia eccitante, spassosa e crudele della cultura tecnologica e, in generale, del mondo moderno. Ricorda molto Kurt Vonnegut». «The Guardian» «Questo libro succinto, sorprendente, infinitamente consapevole è l’Infinite Jest dell’era di Twitter. Oh, ma è anche il Kurt Vonnegut, lo Swift e il Voltaire dell’era di Twitter. Uno spasso». «The Times» «Potrebbe esistere un Houellebecq americano? Jarett Kobek ci si avvicina, nel fervore dei suoi attacchi alle vacche sacre di questa nostra era segretamente vittoriana. Un libro che ho divorato». Jonathan Lethem

Jarett Kobek

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