[Objectionable words have been passwordified; they do not appear that way in the article]

My fiction was too much for the Starmer government

By Ben Sims

In the House of Lords 65 years ago this month, the 6th Earl of Craven reminisced: “It was the day that Lady Chatterley’s Lover was on sale to the public and there, at every serving counter, sat a sn1gger of youths. Every one of them had a copy of this book held up to his face with one hand while he forked nourishment into his open mouth with the other.”

Young people reading novels was scandalous then – but that was the past. Lady Chatterley’s Lover was unbanned, as were Ulysses and Fanny Hill. I grew up with the freedom to think that things said daily in the real world were worthy of written expression. Much of my teenage reading, and likely what made me a writer, seemed to me incorrigibly edgy: The Picture of Dorian Gray, Naked Lunch, The Satanic Verses. It used to be understood that, however disagreeable the content, books deserved to be read if they possessed enough literary merit.

I therefore took it as a considerable critique when my own fiction was banned this week (2 December). Under the UK’s Online Safety Act, AI filters censored and suppressed one of my short stories, published 277 years after Fanny Hill. All UK-based users would have to prove they were over 18 before reading me. My unremarkable short story, “Nothing Unmediated”, described a Nobel Laureate and Oxford fellow who, on his way to a college dinner, is assaulted by muggers. Admittedly I, a mere gay man, had no right to use the words “p00f” and “f@gg0t” in the quoted speech of criminals in fiction. This was “hate content targeting people based on… sexual orientation” (presumably the terms on which the story was hidden from unverified users).

The government had a point. Having been called both a “p00f” and a “f@gg0t” many times in real life before the age of 18, I do wonder if I could have handled encountering those words in a short story. Likewise, it would probably have been wise to shield me from another blocked category, “realistic acts of serious violence or injury to people, animals, or fictional creatures”, such as the harpooning of Moby Dick, the duel in Eugene Onegin, or the Crucifixion of Our Lord.

Many now make their entire living from Substack. Because my writing has less literary merit than Fanny Hill, I do not – but nevertheless I was given no notification or warning that my work would be censored. After profuse whining, “Nothing Unmediated” appears to be accessible again. The principle remains. Fearing a fine of 10 per cent of its revenue, Substack has, sensibly, kowtowed to Ofcom. All sane platforms will.

This is because of how the law is interpreted by Substack, the incredibly genteel publishing platform, now with 50 million users, including novelists Hanif Kureishi, Salman Rushdie, and Ottessa Moshfegh. Following my august example, these and thousands of writers may become inaccessible without age verification.

My fiction being gatekept surreptitiously for two days was hardly a Stasi-like outcome. However, AI-automation (the only way anything as huge as the Internet can be policed) means you now have to seek exemption retrospectively. You are guilty until you request and are granted your innocence.

Perhaps access to fiction might encourage young people to read. But of course, that might cause them, in Lord Craven’s words, “to indulge in a feast of mental, and probably physical, impurity”. Maybe we’re better off keeping them away from challenging literature. Can we expect children to understand something our sensible government can’t?

Also available in Shavian: https://a.co/d/gpq8LFK

A refreshing change from the depressing dystopian science fiction which seems to be de rigeur these days. And ironically, that makes it more like actual science fiction than the "realistic" SF that just brings me down.

Framed as a series of oral history interviews of survivors of the end of capitalism by the authors about the emergence of a post-capitalist society, or cooperating societies, it's a surprisingly hopeful read, even though there are elements that may seem rather alien to the modern reader. Particularly straight older readers like me!

But the idea of a world of communes without money or wages, where people feed and care for each other simply because they're human beings, is incredibly refreshing. It makes me want to read more.

There are a couple of points that did strike me as odd, though. One was the almost total lack of any mention of New England. The oral histories focus on New York, but the near-total lack of any sort of role for New England seemed a bit odd to this New Englander. It's as if the whole region had been scraped off the map! Other areas were mentioned, such as New Jersey and New Orleans. But not one word about anywhere in New England except Maine, and that was very limited. I couldn't help but wonder why.

Another odd point was the near-universality of trans-hood (if that's the right word for it). Virtually everyone interviewed was trans to one degree or another, and I can't recall a single cis person. In fact it was specified that the incidence of transsexualism had been constantly rising since the initial crisis point and failure of capitalism.

This was explicitly tied into huge technological advances in the field, including the option for any gender to gestate offspring. Although initially done via surgical alterations, it was specified later that gene therapy could also accomplish complete regendering - a process which was apparently a relatively casual choice.

This is the point where I'm guessing many readers of this review will find me hopelessly old-fashioned and sexist and contemptible, I suspect. I don't find the notion of gender change particularly disgusting; Robert A. Heinlein was writing about that sort of thing in the '80s, as I recall - albeit in a frequently creepy way. The oft-neglected Justin F. Leiber (son of the great SF author Fritz Leiber) covered the same subject far more professionally in Beyond Rejection (1980). I just find it strains my suspension of disbelief to buy the notion that the majority of the human race would effectively abandon the whole notion of gender within a period of 50 to 80 years.

Maybe I'm wrong. We'll see. That said, I would gladly adjust to any number of changes in order to live in a world where we survive the end of capitalism and fascism. And "Everything For Everyone" presents a vision of such a world in a way that gives me hope.

I'll definitely read it again.

OC review by @BobQuasit@beehaw.org

Hungarian László Krasznahorkai, who won the Nobel Prize in literature for his lyrical novels that combine a bleak worldview with mordant humor, gave a lecture in Stockholm on Sunday in one of his rare public appearances.

The lecture was part of the Nobel week that is underway in Stockholm and Oslo with laureates holding news conferences and giving speeches before they are awarded the prestigious prizes.

Krasznahorkai’s lecture, which he gave in Hungarian, ranged across topics such as old and new angels, human dignity, hope or the lack thereof, rebellion and his observations of a clochard — or tramp — on the Berlin subway.

He introduced his lecture, according to the English translation, by saying that “on receiving the 2025 Nobel Prize in Literature, I originally wished to share my thought with you on the subject of hope, but as my stories of hope have definitely come to an end, I will now speak about angels.”

As opposed to “the angels of old,” the new angels, Krasznahorkai said, “have no wings, but they also have no message, none whatsoever. They are merely here among us in their simple street clothes, unrecognizable if they so wish.”

“They just stand there and look at us, they are searching for our gaze, and in this search there is a plea for us, to look into their eyes, so that we ourselves can transmit a message to them, only that unfortunately, we have no message to give,” the author said.

Expressing himself in his long, winding trademark sentences full of apocalypse and without full stops, he says it comes as a shock when he “detects the horrific story of these new angels that stand before me, the story that they are sacrifices, sacrifices: and not for us, but because of us, for every single one of us, because of every single one of us, angels without wings and angels without a message, and all the while knowing that there is war, war and only war, war in nature, war in society, and this war is being waged not only with weapons, not only with torture, not only with destruction: of course, this is one end of the scale, but this war proceeds at the opposite of the scale as well, because one single bad word is enough.”

When the Nobel judges announced the award for Krasznahorkai in October, they described the 71-year-old as “a great epic writer” whose work “is characterized by absurdism and grotesque excess.”

“Krasznahorkai’s work can be seen as part of a Central European tradition,” the Nobel Prize organization said. ”Important features are pessimism and apocalypse, but also humor and unpredictability.”

His novels include “Satantango,” “The Melancholy of Resistance,” “War and War,” “Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming” and “Herscht 07769,” which are available in English.

Last year’s winner was South Korean author Han Kang. The 2023 winner was Norwegian writer Jon Fosse, whose work includes a seven-book epic made up of a single sentence.

Meanwhile, the director of the Norwegian Nobel Institute, Kristian Harpviken, said Saturday that Venezuelan Peace Prize laureate and opposition leader María Corina Machado will come to Oslo this week to receive her award in person.

The 58-year-old, who won for her struggle to achieve a democratic transition in the South American nation, has been in hiding and has not been seen in public since January.

Harpviken told Norwegian public broadcaster NRK that Machado was expected to personally pick up the prize Wednesday.

“I spoke with the Peace Prize winner last night, and she will come to Oslo,” Harpviken said, according to NRK.

The Nobel Prize award ceremonies will be held Wednesday on the anniversary of founder Alfred Nobel’s death in 1896. The award ceremony for peace is in Oslo and the other ceremonies are in Stockholm.

This book collects 58 pieces of fiction that Anton Chekhov published between the ages of 20 and 22. Many appear in English for the first time. In her introduction, Rosamund Bartlett refers to the material with disarming candour as a ‘wholly unremarkable debut’. Is there ever any point in publishing juvenilia?

In his first years as a medical student Anton Pavlovich dashed off these pieces for a few kopecks a line (his father, born a serf, was a bankrupt shopkeeper). Ranging in length from three paragraphs to 76 pages, they appeared under pseudonyms in lowbrow comic magazines that included another Spectator (founded in Moscow in 1881). Unremarkable they may be – but they open a window on provincial Russia in the early 1880s, the tense period before and after revolutionaries assassinated Tsar Alexander II in St Petersburg. The reader will also enjoy identifying the seeds of the master’s mature style; and indeed some of the stories are worth reading in their own right.

Chekhov’s world unfurls in these pages. Character types limber up, preparing to emerge fully formed in the later work – among them Trifon Semyonovich, the owner of 8,000 acres of black earth, who enthusiastically fleeces ‘peasants and neighbours’ in the short story ‘On Account of the Apples’. Orioles whistle in the blackthorn; a tarantass rumbles past, loaded with travelling rugs and hunters’ guns; the whiff of salted fish pervades the spring air and everywhere narrators (often first-person ones) perceive ‘a sense of tedium… in people’s faces and in the whining of the mosquitoes’.

Experimentation with form is less familiar. The volume includes elaborate parody, satire, gothic fiction and sci-fi (in an example of the latter, mischievously attributed to Jules Verne, a fellow from London’s Royal Geographical Society tries to drill a hole in the moon). Chekhov even employs the epistolary form, in part to indulge his fondness for puns. The very first entry consists of a letter written from the village of Eaten Pancakes. The editors have curated this disparate, uneven stuff skilfully. The excellent footnotes explain the abundant wordplay.

As for the translation, the book is the result of a remarkable international collaboration. Eighty-three individuals from nine countries have each translated a piece and then passed it around for team revision. No individual translator’s name follows any one story, but a group credit appears at the beginning. This cooperative approach, a notable success, achieves a consistency often absent from multi-translator anthologies.

Returning to the ‘unremarkable’ aspect of the whole: endings do tend to have a dying fall, as though Chekhov were in a rush to get the thing off his desk. The squibs and comic skits are of the schoolboy variety – though I quite liked the Spectator fake ads, one offering sausage-free worms. ‘The Distorting Mirror (A Christmas Tale)’ was the only piece here that Chekhov included in his first Collected Works, and one can see why. The story has a thematic unity lacking elsewhere in this debut spread.

Chekhov had not found his voice by 1882 – but you can see him searching for it. (One novella foreshadows the theme of his celebrated story ‘The Bet’.) In short, the everyday realism of the later work is on display in this collection, but not its psychological depth. After all, the callow youth had not yet experienced the emotions at the heart of the later great stories and plays. (In Britain he is best known for his stage work; in Russia, for his short stories.) He had not confronted the unfathomable realities of life, nor the ambiguity and nuance that govern human behaviour. We go to the theatre to hear the Trigorins and the Prozorovs express elegiac melancholy – and that is not a young man’s game. On the other hand, the slapstick here humanises the writer whose sense of dramatic economy once caused him to note with approval the effect of placing a pistol on a table in the first act.

What links should we seek between an author’s early and late work anyway? How many of our juvenile preoccupations still concern us in middle age? The man who conjured Uncle Vanya was once a coltish 20-year-old. The trajectory from the inky youth of this book to the titan we know from the plays might be the most Chekhovian theme of all.

Dorian Lynskey

Doublethink & Doubt Orwell: 2+2=5 By Raoul Peck (dir) George Orwell: Life and Legacy By Robert Colls Oxford University Press 208pp £14.99

Nobody under the age of seventy-five has heard George Orwell’s voice. The only extant video footage is in a silent movie of the Eton Wall Game. None of his many wartime recordings for the BBC Eastern Service has survived. By all accounts his voice, damaged by a bullet to the throat during the Spanish Civil War, was thin, flat and weak. In fact, the controller of the BBC Overseas Service complained that putting on ‘so wholly unsuitable a voice’ made the BBC appear ‘ignorant of the essential needs of the microphone and of the audience’. Even photographs of Orwell are few and far between, which is why you see the same ones over and over again. For the most part, he exists only on the page, and in our heads.

This poses a challenge to the documentarian, but is an opportunity, too. In the Haitian director Raoul Peck’s film Orwell: 2+2=5, which screened at the London Film Festival and is on general release in March, Orwell’s fellow Old Etonian Damian Lewis gives us the voice we like to imagine: wry, resonant, penetrating, crisply authoritative and quietly furious about the many varieties of bullshit he made it his mission to expose. Peck says that Orwell’s writing is the film’s ‘libretto’, and it is accompanied by scenes from adaptations and docudramas, copious news footage and a witty array of film clips (Ken Loach’s Land and Freedom, Oliver Twist, Terry Gilliam’s Brazil and the recent horror film M3GAN all make an appearance).

As in I Am Not Your Negro, his 2016 film about James Baldwin, Peck uses Orwell as a kind of seer, commenting simultaneously on his own era and ours. Orwell never set out to be a timeless prophet, but in trying to explain the horrors of the 1930s and 40s he identified enduring truths about the cruelties and hypocrisies of power. Cue references to Edward Snowden, Jamal Khashoggi, AI, Iraq, Putin’s press conferences, cross-Channel refugees and (repeatedly) Trump. The strength of this connective tissue varies. While it’s bracing to cut from Orwell’s imperial service in 1920s Burma to atrocities in 2020s Myanmar, a segue from the Black Lives Matter slogan ‘I can’t breathe’ to Orwell dying from tuberculosis feels strangely offensive to both parties. Like Asif Kapadia’s Orwellian docudrama 2073, Peck’s film risks seeming like a compendium of everything that is wrong with the world. But I enjoyed its ambition nonetheless.

I doubt that Robert Colls, in his short new biography, George Orwell: Life and Legacy, feels the same way. Orwell: 2+2=5 would seem the work of a man too infatuated with what Colls calls Orwell’s ‘intellectual mystique, a “cool” more often bestowed on rock stars than writers’, and too confident about claiming Orwell for the Left. Colls swings in the opposite direction with a pronounced conservative bias. When hunting for current examples of the persecutions of ‘thoughtcrime’, for example, Colls averts his eyes from the Trump administration’s war on free expression and alights on British universities and publishers. His subtler observations – he likens Nineteen Eighty-Four to ‘a dream about being inside the head of a country that is in the process of losing its mind’ – must compete with the din of partisan axe-grinding.

Orwell’s idiosyncratic jumble of liberal, socialist and conservative instincts can accommodate both Peck’s and Colls’s needs. His fabulously wry first wife, Eileen, described his landmark 1941 essay ‘The Lion and the Unicorn’ as ‘a little book explaining how to be a Socialist, though Tory’. Even in his most revolutionary moods, Orwell was very specific about what should stay and what should go. Small wonder that he found fault with every version of socialism except his own. But then he gave nobody an easy ride, least of all himself. With the sole exception of Animal Farm, he described all of his fiction as ‘awful’ or ‘bollox’ and took masochistic pleasure in itemising all the faulty predictions that he made during the war. ‘It seems to me very important to realise that we have been wrong, and say so,’ he wrote in Partisan Review towards the end of 1944.

Peck focuses on what Orwell got brilliantly right – about fascism, communism, imperialism, nationalism, the abuses of new technology and the lies people tell themselves without necessarily realising. But even when Orwell was proved wrong, which was often, he was wrong in a sincere and interesting way. To quote his disclaimer in Homage to Catalonia, ‘I warn everyone against my bias, and I warn everyone against my mistakes. Still, I have done my best to be honest.’

Truth-seeking was Orwell’s creed. As Colls writes, ‘all his life Orwell would charge his enemies not so much with evil but with fraud … All swindlers. All a racket. Down with rackets.’ He trusted things he had personally seen, heard or felt while wrinkling his nose at theory and rhetoric. This justifies Milan Kundera’s blunt claim, as seen in Peck’s film, that Orwell ‘hated politics’. He developed his own organic English socialism by pitting the cheerful solidity of the working classes against the dishonest contortions and sterile fads of the intellectuals.

Where Colls’s chronological approach has the edge on Peck’s time-hopping is in clarifying Orwell’s evolution as a political thinker and the immense effort he put into re-examining his priors. In 1938, as Eileen noted, he retained ‘an extraordinary political simplicity in spite of everything’. The Road to Wigan Pier is oblivious to vast swathes of working-class life, while Homage to Catalonia, brilliant though it may be, is a keyhole view of the Spanish Civil War. Contemporaries such as his future friend Malcolm Muggeridge, in his remarkable 1940 book The Thirties, had a stronger grip on the big picture. The Second World War transformed Orwell by purging some bad habits, from his crude, alarmist pacifism to his unthinking anti-Semitism, and sharpening his eye. Colls argues nicely that, through his wartime output for the BBC, Tribune, Partisan Review and others, Orwell ‘composed, in effect, a prose opera of the English people’. He became the man who could write masterpieces.

Anyone who has engaged with Orwell will be cognisant of his flaws: the seductive generalisations, the hyperbolic denunciations, the frequent appeals to ‘common sense’ (really an umbrella term for the opinions of George Orwell). But his weaknesses, like his strengths, flowed from his obsession with moral clarity in a world drowning in humbug. In many ways, his politics were unsophisticated, yet more sophisticated thinkers were more likely to miss the wood for the trees.

For this reason, Orwell’s reputation has comfortably withstood every unflattering revelation, from his carelessness towards women to his unresolved prejudices. Perhaps the real danger now is that he becomes a floating signifier for people who have only read Nineteen Eighty-Four, if that, and understood almost none of it. When the richest man in the world recently addressed a far-right rally in London from a giant TV screen while wearing a ‘WHAT WOULD ORWELL THINK’ T-shirt, the jokes wrote themselves. Both Peck and Colls counteract such clumsy hijacking simply by drawing attention to what Orwell actually wrote. In 2025, it is not his enemies that Orwell needs defending against but his pseudo-admirers

$1 at a used book sale

Gate of Ivrel, by CJ Cherryh, is a fantastic blend of science fiction and fantasy. Great characters, a fun world, and just so well written. I loved this book, one of my favorites of the year for sure.

Reginald Dwayne Betts was locked up as a teenager for carjacking. Books were his escape, and he went on to be a poet, lawyer and founder of Freedom Reads.

Archived at https://archive.is/0Z0JW

There is a growing body of First Nations titles being published every year. The massive success of authors such as Wright and Lucashenko – Wright alone has won two Miles Franklin awards and two Stella prizes – signals a long-overdue recognition of First Nations literary excellence.

Given this, here are ten First Nations books from the past 25 years (in no particular order) I would nominate for the books of the century.

Anyone read any of these? I've shamefully not read any.

Carl Hiaasen's 'Fever Beach' (permalink)

Every Carl Hiaasen novel is a cause for celebration, but Fever Beach, his latest, makes it abundantly clear that this moment, this moment of Florida Man violent white nationalist grifting, is the moment that Hiaasen has been training for his whole life:

https://carlhiaasen.com/books/fever-beach/

Hiaasen is a crime novelist who got his start as a newspaper writer, writing columns about Florida's, ah, unique politics – and sublime, emperilled wilderness – for the Miami Herald. That beat, combined with enormous humor and literary talent, produced a writer who perfectly hybridizes Dave Barry's lovable absurdism with the hard-boiled pastoralism of the Travis McGee novels (Hiaasen wrote the introductions for a 1990s reissue of all of John D McDonald's McGee books).

Hiaasen's method is diabolical and hilarious: each volume introduces a bewildering cast of odd, crooked, charming, and/or loathsome Floridians drawn from his long experience chronicling the state and its misadventures. Every one of these people is engaged in some form of skulduggery, even the heroes, who are every bit as lawless and wild as their adversaries, though Hiaasen's protagonists are always smarter and more competent than his villains. The plots and schemes play out like an intricate clock that has been much-elaborated by a mad clockmaker with an affinity for eccentric gears, all set against the background of Florida, a glorious and beautiful place being fed into a woodchipper powered by unchecked greed and depravity.

After 20-some volumes in this vein (including Bad Monkey, lately adapted for Apple TV), something far weirder than anything Hiaasen ever dreamed up came to pass: Donald Trump, the most Florida Man ever, was elected president. If you asked an LLM to write a Hiaasen novel, you might get Trump: a hacky, unimaginative version of the wealthy, callous, scheming grifters of the Hiaasenverse. Back in 2020, Hiaasen wrote Trump into Squeeze Me, a tremendous and madcap addition to his canon:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/05/florida-man/#disappearing-act

Fever Beach is the first Hiaasen novel since Squeeze Me, and boy, does Hiaasen ever have MAGA's number.

The book revolves around a classic Hiaasen bumbler, Dale Figgo, an incompetent white nationalist who was kicked out of the Proud Boys after the Jan 6 insurrection, when he mistook a statue of a revered Confederate general for Ulysses S Grant (it was the beard) and released a video of himself smearing shit all over it. Cast out from the brotherhood of violent racists, Figgo founds his own white nationalist militia: the Strokers for Liberty, which differentiates itself from the Proud Boys by encouraging (rather than forbidding) frequent masturbation. Figgo takes his inspiration from his day-job, where he packs and ships disembodied torso sex-dolls for an adult e-commerce site, and he entices new Strokers by offering them free limbless fuck-dolls (stolen from work) as a signing bonus.

Figgo lives in a house bought for him by his long-suffering – and seriously boxing gym-addicted – mother, who despairs of his virulent racism. Her one source of comfort is Figgo's tenant, Viva Morales, a smart granting officer in the family office of the Minks (an ultra-wealthy Florida oligarch couple) who does not tolerate any of Figgo's bullshit and also pays her rent like clockwork.

Viva is the other fulcrum of the tale: her employers, the elderly couple behind the Mink Foundation, are secret white nationalist bankrollers who use their charity to funnel money to militia groups, including Strokers For Liberty. The conduit between the Minks and the Strokers is Congressman Clure Boyette, a MAGA Republican failson of an ultra-powerful Florida lobbyist, who (unbeknownst to his father) has raised $2m for the Strokers to finance a "Stop the Steal pollwatching" operation designed to terrorize voters who favor his opponent.

As a front for this dark money op, Boyette has founded the "Wee Hammers," a charity that pulls prepubescent children out of school and puts them to work with heavy power tools to construct houses in a child-labor-centric MAGA version of Habitat for Humanity. This goes about as well as you might expect.

Into this maelstrom, Viva Morales draws Twilly Spree, a recurring character first introduced in 2000's Sick Puppy as a successor to Skink, one of Hiaasen's best heroes. Twilly is a millionaire ecoterrorist who uses his family's obscene wealth – secured through investments in planet-raping extraction – to fund his arson, bombings, and general fuckery directed against Florida's most flagrant despoilers (it helps that Twilly has been psychologically gifted with the literal inability to feel fear). Twilly and Viva become a couple, and Twilly does what Twilly does – wreaking hilarious, violent and spectacular chaos upon the book's many characters.

There are so many characters – I've barely scratched the surface here. There's Galaxy, a dominatrix who loses patience with her long-term client, the MAGA Congressman Clure Boyette, after he stiffs her on a payment because he was too busy tweeting about an alleged plan by woke billiard manufacturers to replace the nation's black 8-balls with Pride-themed rainbow versions. There's Clure Boyette's soon-to-be-ex-wife, who must not, on any account, be shown the photos Galaxy took of Clure in a fur dog-collar and leash defecating on the floor of a luxury hotel suite. There's Jonas Onus, the number two man in the Strokers For Liberty, who terrorizes all and sundry by bringing them into contact with Himmler, his 120lb pitbull mix. There's Noel Kristianson, whom Dale Figgo runs over and nearly kills during an altercation over Figgo's practice of stuffing incoherent antisemitic rants into ziplock bags weighted with beach-sand and tossing them onto the driveways of unsuspecting Floridians. There's a constellation of minor characters and spear-carriers, including Key West drag queen martial artists and assorted discount-store Nazis, long-suffering charter bus drivers and a hit man who cannot abide racial prejudice.

The resulting story has more twists and turns than an invasive Burmese python, that apex predator of the gate-guarded McMansion development. It's screamingly funny, devilishly inventive, and deeply, profoundly satisfying. With Fever Beach, Hiaasen makes a compelling case for Florida as the perfect microcosm of the terrifying state of America, and an even more compelling case for his position as its supreme storyteller.

You do not need to have read any of Hiaasen's other novels to love this one. But I'm pretty sure that if you start with this one, you're going to want to dig into the dozens of other Hiaasen books, and you will not be disappointed if you do.