Nut Jobs Author _hot_ -

But the true Nut Jobs Author does not live in the past. They are publishing right now, on obscure presses or Amazon Kindle Direct, sending screeds to literary magazines that delete them unread.

There is a peculiar thrill in picking up a book that comes with a warning label. Not the staid, corporate sticker about explicit content, but the whispered, urgent caution of a friend: “You have to read this, but… the author is kind of a nut job.” nut jobs author

So raise a glass to the paranoid, the grandiose, the delusional, the obsessive. Raise a glass to the author who replied to your polite rejection email with a 10,000-word treatise on how you are a pawn of the psychic vampires. They are annoying, exhausting, and often wrong. But the true Nut Jobs Author does not live in the past

Every era gets the nut jobs it deserves. The 20th century gave us the high-modernist crackpots, men like , who, while revolutionizing poetry from his cage in Pisa, also believed that usury and a vast Jewish conspiracy were the root of all cultural decay. His Cantos are a masterpiece of unreadable, beautiful, and morally repugnant obsession. To read Pound is to swim in a brilliant, poisoned stream. He is the patron saint of the genre: a writer so convinced of his own system that the system eats the art alive. Not the staid, corporate sticker about explicit content,

To understand the species, we must break it down. There are three primary archetypes of the Nut Jobs Author.

Of course, there is a dark side. Not every nut job is a Burroughs or a Pound. Many are just bigots with word processors. The line between “outsider visionary” and “hateful crank” is thin and bloody. The manifesto of the Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski ( Industrial Society and Its Future ), is a perfectly logical, brilliantly argued, utterly insane text. It is also a blueprint for murder. The literary world has a hard time with this. We want our crazies to be lovable, like crying about the Dharma Bums. We don’t want them building bombs.