Jarett Kobek - Only Americans Burn in Hell

This was in the summer of 2013 AD.

While I was at the residency, I met the Danish writer Dorthe Nors.

In addition to being a truly lovely person, Dorthe also happens to be one of the best writers in the world. Her books Minna Needs Rehearsal Space and Mirror, Shoulder, Signal are fucking intellectual masterpieces.

But she’s a woman, which means that while she’s become very successful, her work is always reviewed in a specific way: no one pays attention to the intellect and everyone looks for the moral instruction.

Dorthe and I became friends.

She was on the cusp of becoming a literary superstar.

In 2017 AD, she was nominated for a Man Booker International.

No one deserved the award more.

In the unique case of Dorthe, I suspend my disdain for awards.

Dorthe doesn’t just deserve the Man Booker International.

She deserves every award.

She should win the Nobel Prize in Literature.

She should win Motor Trend’s Car of the Year.

Bad Sex in Fiction!

As Dorthe was transforming into a superstar, she helped me out in whatever ways that she could. This is how I ended up getting an email in the summer of 2014 AD from a guy named Adrian Todd Zuniga.

Adrian Todd Zuniga is the founder and the host of a thing called Literary Death Match.

He’d met Dorthe somewhere in Europe, at one of the ten billion literary festivals that extend invitations to Dorthe.

She told him that he should have me participate in Literary Death Match.

So he reached out.

I said yes.

Saying yes to Literary Death Match was a moral compromise of the highest order.

To understand why, I need to explain the thing.

Literary Death Match works like this: four writers are given the opportunity to read their work.

Unlike normal readings, Literary Death Match happens in two rounds.

In each round, two writers perform their work, and then their work is critiqued by three judges. These judges are often celebrities.

The judges choose one writer as the victor of each round, and then the two victors face off against one another in a final round which involves a humiliating game.

Whoever demonstrates the greatest capacity for making a fool of themselves is the winner of Literary Death Match.

This is awful shit. It’s the clusterfuck of debasement that has overtaken writing.

Everyone pretends that they’re on the same side, everyone pretends that they’re friends, and everyone makes awful pronouncements about the seriousness of their work while maintaining their aw shucks relatability, and sometimes writers are rewarded for their pomposity with badly rendered line drawings of their faces on bookshop walls.

And sometimes, if the writer is a good little boy, people will reward his pomposity with the gift of a tote bag.

Most of these tote bags have an aphorism or a logo printed on their sides.

The aphorisms and logos are always very positive about publishing.

I’ve never bought a tote bag in my life.

But I’ve still got about twenty hanging in my kitchen.

One of them says BOOKS.

I knew what Literary Death Match was.

I abhorred it.

And I still said yes.

That’s how desperate I was.

Summer of 2014 AD was particularly bad.

I’d finished writing the manuscript for I Hate the Internet and two things had become apparent: (1) it was the most significant piece of work that I’d done and (2) absolutely no one would publish it.

When I was offered Literary Death Match, these two things had left me beyond debased.

I was thinking, honestly, that if I won the thing, it’d at least give me another meaningless credential to put in query emails to agents who would refuse to represent my manuscript.

The iteration of Literary Death Match to which I’d been invited occurred on July 10th, 2014 AD, and it was held at Largo at Coronet on La Cienaga Boulevard.

Largo is one of those venues that people who aren’t from Los Angeles can’t possibly understand. It’s where the Celebrity branch of American governance entertains itself in a 280-seat venue.

If your response to the existential horror of Donald J. Trump is a desire to have your liberal pieties reinforced with a joke about Star Trek , then you should fly to Los Angeles and go to Largo.

The comedian Patton Oswalt will be waiting with your chuckles.

The other writers who were performing at Literary Death Match were Aimee Bender, Jay Martel, and Annabelle Gurwitch.

Jay Martel was the producer of Key & Peele , which was a popular sketch comedy show in which two African-American actors who’d grown up as members of the middle classes performed skits based around the hilarity inherent in the accents of poor African-Americans.

Annabelle Gurwitch was an actress who’d found some success as a writer of books about her sex drive as she approached the age of fifty.

Aimee Bender was a literary writer. She taught creative writing at the University of Southern California, and was director of that university’s Creative Writing PhD program.

I’ve never read her work, but my friend Dean Smith was in the audience at Largo with his boyfriend Mike Kitchell, and Dean Smith said that he’d read Aimee Bender’s book The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake .

The judges at Literary Death Match were Amber Tamblyn, Jody Hill, and Dana Gould.

Amber Tamblyn was an actor and a poet with several volumes of published poetry. She’d done a lot of good in the world, having convinced people to give money to the poet Diane di Prima when Diane di Prima had serious healthcare issues and needed help with the costs.

At the time of Literary Death Match, Amber Tamblyn was just coming off a starring role in Season Eleven of the sitcom Two and a Half Men , which was the highest-rated television show in America.

Jody Hill was a director and writer of films and television. Through the terrible magic of Los Angeles, we’d met about eight years earlier, but neither of us could remember where.

Dana Gould was a stand-up comedian and a former writer for The Simpsons .

To state the bleedingly obvious: I was the freak.

Everyone else at Literary Death Match had significant amounts of money and significant amounts of success, and with the exception of Aimee Bender, all of them were representatives from the Celebrity branch of American governance.

I was poor and I wrote psychedelic biographies of Islamic-themed terrorists.

Thanks, Dorthe!

The first round of Literary Death Match was Aimee Bender versus Jay Martel.

I was in Largo’s green room with Annabelle Gurwitch.

She was charming.

When Aimee Bender and Jay Martel stopped reading, the judges chimed in and offered opinions on their work. The judges ended up going with Aimee Bender.

I should say that I had never been to a Literary Death Match.

So I had no idea what the judges’ critiques would be like.

I certainly wasn’t expecting what I saw during the first round, which was a rah-rah all-in-together-now malice masked by a layer of bonhomie.

If you want to imagine an analogue, think about Celebrity Roasts, which are spectacles where a celebrity will attend an event that honors the celebrity by having other celebrities say cruel things about the honored celebrity.

Literary Death Match wasn’t anywhere as cruel as a Celebrity Roast.

But it was the same atmosphere.

Somewhere in the middle of this, when Amber Tamblyn was talking, she mentioned that she was drunk.

The next round happened.

Annabelle Gurwitch and I had decided in the green room that she’d read first.

She did.

And then I read.

My appearance at Literary Death Match occurred after years of countless San Francisco literary readings. If I’d learned anything, it was how to work an audience.