Dungeon Crawler Carl by Matt Dinniman
Dungeon Crawler Carl is an unhinged, hyper-violent romp through a deadly alien game show where humanity’s survival is just another ratings gimmick. Imagine Ready Player One if it were soaked in acid, drenched in blood, and filtered through the twisted lens of a cynical stand-up comic, gleefully skewering pop culture, bureaucracy, and reality TV tropes, all while delivering absurdly inventive action and a surprisingly coherent leveling system. The book walks a fine line between hilarious and horrifying, and it knows exactly what it’s doing.
At the heart of the chaos is Carl, a barefoot everyman with zero tolerance for nonsense, and his companion Princess Donut, a sentient, eye-laser-wielding talking cat with the attitude of a diva and the firepower of a tank. If you’ve ever wanted your litRPG with more bite, more satire, and a lot more exploding limbs, Dungeon Crawler Carl delivers. What’s not to like?
After being recommended this book I didn’t know what to think, but suddenly I found myself racing through the first and halfway through the second in the space of a week. And I’m happy to say there are plenty more in the series! – Henry
Didion & Babitz by Lili Anolik
Eve Babitz: a hedonistic, hot-headed party girl and self-proclaimed ‘dowager groupie’.
Joan Didion: the poster girl of California cool, reserved and watchful behind oversized sunglasses. Both writers made Los Angeles their home and their subject… but what was their relationship to each other?
Using journals, diaries, photographs, and letters found in Babitz’s apartment after her death, journalist Lili Anolik charts a tumultuous friendship and simmering animosity between these two great writers. Scathing and gossipy – this pulpy biography transports you straight to sun-soaked Hollywood in the 70s, where artists and movie stars mix with drug dealers and Manson girls. This isn’t serious scholarship on either writer… but it is seriously good fun. – Liv
The Striker and the Clock by Georgia Cloepfil
An absolute revolution of thoughtful and original sports writing – if Rachel Kushner had played professional football, she might have come up with something like The Striker and the Clock.
Cloepfil writes of her life as a journeying professional footballer: being a woman in sport, the empowerment yet harsh realities of the body for a female athlete, the ruthless march of time, the psychology of the striker, and so much more make this a gloriously fresh book. From the local sports field to the champions league, via Korea, Australia, Sweden and Lithuania, she captures the reality for pros at the brutal end of a remorseless industry.
This is a football memoir that makes a mockery of all the flaccid, ghostwritten garbage that big stars churn out year in, year out. – Tom M