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This story appears in our Fall 2026 issue featuring cover star Charli XCX, on newsstands September 28th. Want us to come to your place? Subscribe here to get it delivered to your door.
“H ow long is it?” is the question comedian Anthony Jeselnik hears most often these days. He’s not lurking in dick pic subreddits. He is recommending novels. To most men he talks to, before plot or prose quality comes page count.
Luckily, brevity is Jeselnik’s thing. He built a career on spare, almost experimental jokes that plumb death and catastrophe, then snap with a vicious shift in perspective. He forms them, he has said, “almost like a haiku.”
A Jeselnik classic: “Like a month ago, some kids in my neighborhood were playing hide-and-go-seek, and one of them ended up in an abandoned refrigerator. That’s all anybody talked about for weeks. I said, ‘Who cares? How many kids do you know get to die a winner?’”
Aside from penning jokes that tickle the cruelest corners of our brains, Jeselnik is spending a lot of time on another outlet: the Jeselnik Book Club, where, since January, he has recommended a novel a month. Jim Thompson’s The Getaway was the first recommendation; selections often come in under 250 pages. “I want to give people as few excuses as possible to not read the book,” he says. His goal is to get men through 12 books this year—and keep them reading, even after he stops assigning homework. There is work to do: In a December 2025 YouGov poll, 44 percent of American men said they had not read a book in the past year.
Jeselnik’s extreme reading habit flourishes when he’s on tour, where not drinking leaves long nights in strange hotel rooms. “If I go home to the hotel and turn on the TV and watch six episodes of Storage Wars, I feel like I’ve wasted my time,” he says.
“Before phones, guys would be on the toilet and pick up a bottle of shampoo to read.”
Besides, he says, he’s started to find the narratives in movies and TV lacking: “They’ve sanded off the edges. It wasn’t that way in the ’70s and ’80s.” Fiction still allows for difficult, strange, or compellingly awful characters, and makes readers live inside them.
“People say, ‘I read nonfiction. I read serious books,’ which drives me crazy, because novels are pretty fucking serious,” he says. “You might not be able to name the person at the end of the book, but you feel what they felt.” Fiction, he says, lets him inhabit women, people from other countries and eras, and those whose politics differ from his.
The first step is teaching your brain not to read like your mother watches movies: “Some guy walks on screen, and Mom’s like, ‘Who’s that?’ And you’re like, ‘I have no fucking idea who that is. The movie just started.’” Read with “soft eyes,” Jeselnik says. “Miss a name. Lose the plot. I read like 100 books a year, and in some of them, I couldn’t tell you what happened.”
Becoming a fiction reader—after some time away, or for the first time as an adult—is all reps and volume. “It’s like going to the gym,” he says. “Your first couple of workouts are going to fucking suck, and there’s no way around it.” Start with short novels and short chapters. The Getaway, Jeselnik says, is easy to follow and morally complicated, and ends with a chapter that “knocks you on your ass.” Bret Easton Ellis’s Less Than Zero taught him that “you could do awful things in books.”
Reading, he says, carries “zero consequences—it’s all benefit,” like getting someone hooked on cigarettes one at a time. “They’re gonna hate that [first] cigarette, but if you just keep at it… Eventually, you’re addicted.”
This fall, Anthony Jeselnik takes a new hour of material around the country on his Wrath of Man tour.