Anthony Jeselnik’s Book Club & The Literary Legacy of Playboy Magazine

My apologies to Anthony Jeselnik, I was not familiar with your game.

In addition to being an incisive stand-up whose scathing comedy would make Bill Hicks proud, the man reads voraciously and is on a mission to get people reading.

A friend clued me in to Anthony Jeselnik’s Book Club when it was in its nascent stages - a monthly email with recommendations - and I was immediately excited.

Not because I was a big fan of his stand-up but more so because I love when people recommend books to me.

I started learning a little more about this side project and it turns out that Jeselnik sees his book club as an antidote to the manosphere and the rise in anti-intellectualism.

“It helps with the masculinity crisis in that reading is masculine. It is a masculine thing to do,” he says. “The Hemingways of the world were out there. It used to be a badass thing to be a writer, and a brave thing to put your thoughts onto the page and publish them.”

I saw a creator on TikTok lamenting that the literacy crisis has gotten so bad even Playboy was chiming in on it.

Do…do…do the baby children not know about Playboy?

My God, the literacy crisis has gotten that bad.

I know that 30 Rock made this joke over a decade ago, but does Gen Z only know Playboy for the Girls Next Door and “that old boat captain that shows up sometime?”

I mean, don’t get me wrong - Hugh Hefner is undoubtedly spit-roasting in hell for how he treated women (both in life and in death. Read up on where he’s buried. Can’t even leave women alone after they die) and deserves a legacy of ash and ire, but Playboy Magazine actually upholds a pretty incredible literary tradition.

A serialized version of Ray Bradbury’s Farenheit 451 appeared in Playboy as did On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, the James Bond story by Ian Fleming.

Vonnegut wrote Welcome to the Monkeyhouse, Murakami wrote The Second Bakery Attack and Gabriel Garcia Marquez debuted the English translation of The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World in Playboy.

Kerouac’s prequel to On The Road titled Before The Road, Norman Mailer wrote about the Rumble in the Jungle for Playboy, Alex Haley interviewed both Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X for the publication and James Baldwin wrote Words of a Native Son for the publication.

And while the majority of the contributing writers were men, some pretty prolific women wrote for Playboy too - Ursula K. Guin (Nine Lives), Joyce Carol Oates (Saul Bird Says: Relate! Communicate! Liberate!), Bharati Mukerjee (The Middleman) and Margaret Atwood (The Bog Man).

My point in all this is to say that two things can be true - is Playboy a purveyor of misogyny which caters to the male gaze?

Yes.

Is it also a bastion for free speech which paid writers well?

Yes.

To anyone who is unaware of Playboy’s literary legacy, it’s definitely worth reading up on.

Also worth reading up on?

Literally everything.