They were a rather legendary outfit: The Unbearables. For the uninitiated:

…. a loose confederation of poets and writers who came of age in 1980s and 90s New York. Infamous for their high-minded aesthetics and low, barroom manners, the group has sought to torment literary powers-that-be throughout its more than two decades of existence. The group is probably best known for organizing a boycott in 1995 of The New Yorker, protesting its flaccid, middle-of-the-road poetry. Their campaign eventually led “the most righteously un of the Unbearables,” the poet Sparrow, to be published in its August pages.

Well, that was a few years ago but they’re back. As Tim W. Brown reports in this Brooklyn Rail story, the group’s “latest attempt at being royal pains” is a new book, The Worst Book I Ever Read, just out from the great radical Brooklyn press Autonomedia. The book is a collection of essays by members past and present—including Alan Kaufman, David Ulin (yes, thatDavid Ulin—now better known as the L.A. Times book editor), Jessica Willisand others—about their worst reading experience, and as such, constitutes “416 pages of violence and mayhem committed against literary works and authors both familiar and obscure.”

For example: Ulin says “Ulysses is without a doubt the worst important book I’ve ever read …. a mess of arrogant self-indulgence that refuses to hang together, that has more to do with the ego of its author than with the organic urgency of its plot.” Marvin J. Taylor‘s essay is called “Fuck You, David Sedaris.” And José Padua writes of his horror at receiving a contributor’s copy of a book called Mondo Barbie in which he’d allowed one of his poems to be anthologized: “[T]hese pages are fucking pink. Oh my fucking god! [T]his might be the worst fucking book ever. And I’m in it.”