5 Painfully Hilarious Politically Incorrect Books

What pedicured pets have to do with Hitler and the supremacy of Y chromosomes.

There’s just too much political correctness in the world these days, stiffening up society like the sun does roadkill. So, today, we turn to five books that flip political correctness on its head and help us loosen up with irony, mockery and sarcasm aimed at the very pillars of PC. Unabashedly offensive and outrageously absurd, they let us, as we laugh through our tears, engage in timely and relevant social commentary through the lens of humor.

STUFF WHITE PEOPLE LIKE

We’ve been fans of Christian Lander’s Stuff White People Like since it first launched nearly 3 years ago. In fact, it was so excellent that it wasn’t long until it joined the ranks of blog-turned-book success stories and Stuff White People Like: A Definitive Guide to the Unique Taste of Millions was born: An ingenious portrait of today’s “white” person as a psychographic subset, not an ethnic one — you know, the troops of organic, iconic, iPhone-slinging, Prius-driving educated liberal twenty- and thirtysomethings — that will make you feel distinctly less unique than you think you are.

Browse the full list of stuff and you’ll see what we mean.

PETS WHO WANT TO KILL THEMSELVES

People love their pets. Some just love them a tad too much. Pet pedicures, doggie gyms and an entire thriving mini-fashion industry of pet apparel all speak to a frighteningly frivolous obsession, never mind how its objects might actually feel about it. Pets Who Want to Kill Themselves: Featuring Over 150 Suicidal Pets! is a collection of photos depicting miserable-looking pets, paired with laugh-out-funny captions that capture the most absurd extreme of this domestication abuse epidemic — a tragicomic encapsulation of today’s most outrageous petkeeping.

120 FUNNY SWASTIKA CARTOONS

From acclaimed New Yorker cartoonist Sam Gross comes We Have Ways of Making You Laugh: 120 Funny Swastika Cartoons, which we’ve featured before — a collection of outrageous and poignant visual reflections on the reactions, emotions and controversy the notorious symbol has been triggering for more than half a century. Part exercise in purging some of humanity’s heaviest burdens through humor, part witty meditation on one of history’s darkest episodes, the book lives up to the promise of its title: It will make you laugh.

MEN ARE BETTER THAN WOMEN

This is where things start to get really hairy: The unequivocally titled Men Are Better Than Women by the appropriately named Dick Masterson (surely, a pseudonym) is a practical handbook for the art of chauvinism. The magnum-sized volume offers a plethora of affirmations of man’s greatness, backed by solid man-logic and offering “an immediate payoff.”

If Sacha-Cohen-type humor is your thing, let Masterson — let’s just call him Dick, shall we? — take you for a dance along the line between outrageous offensiveness and amusing absurdity.

LOOK AT THIS F*CKING HIPSTER

Another blog-turned-book deal, based on the popular Tumblr of the same name, Joe Mande’s Look at This F*cking Hipster is belly-achingly hilarious collection of photos, paired with appropriately snarky captions, alongside short essays poking witty fun at the cultural phenomenon that is the hipster.

From a taxonomy of hipster types to a brief history of the hipster through the ages to celebrity hipsters, the book is a kind of fascinating remote people-watching that, finally, lets you stare, point and judge like you always wanted to in The Burg.

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A Year of Mornings: 3191 Miles Apart

How photographers do long-distance relationships.

When best friends Stephanie and Mav had to move apart, the fruits of telecommunication weren’t enough of a bond for them. Instead, the two artists launched 3191 — a photoblog named after the exact distance between their homes. Every morning for a year each of them posted a photo of herself and some other environmental element of her morning, then posted the pictures side by side for a parallel universe in a shared moment. (A project we originally featured nearly three years ago.)

So wonderful was the concept and so artful the photographs, that Stephanie and Mav eventually got a book deal and A Year of Mornings: 3191 Miles Apart was born — a worthy addition to our running list of blog-turned-book success stories.

There’s something incredibly poetic about this exercise in remote togetherness that both uses the connectivity of the digital age and defies its traditional communication platforms. A Year of Mornings isn’t merely a beautiful book of photography, although it certainly is that, but also a powerful meditation on impermanence, remembrance and belonging.

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Blog-Turned-Book Success Stories: Part Two

Charting happiness, why you should tip your waiter, and how to tug at heartstrings right.

Last week, we spotlighted five of our ten favorite blog-turned-book success stories. Today, we’re back with the sequel.

INDEXED

It’s no secret we have an infoviz fetish, fueling our longtime love affair with the wonderful Indexed blog — Jessica Hagy’s absolutely charming graph-and-chart-driven visual exploration of, well, everything. With brevity and brilliance, Indexed has captured everything from the secret formula of James Cameron’s biggest hits to the challenges of proposing to a virgin.

So we have no words to describe just how much we’re loving Indexed, the book — a wonderfully curated selection from what’s already a treasure trove of gems.

WAITER RANT

Since 2004, one veteran New York waiter has been dishing out delightfully cynical musings about the inner workings of the restaurant world in Waiter Rant — a hilariously candid and unfiltered account of life in the restaurant service industry.

Waiter Rant: Thanks for the Tip — Confessions of a Cynical Waiter captures the best, juiciest, most amusing of these stories, from chef scandals to patrons from hell, and promises a solid chuckle.

Thanks for the reminder, @femmmefatal

THE SECRET DIARY OF STEVE JOBS

He’s been worshiped and reviled, but what do we really know about the man who “invented the friggin iPhone”? Thanks to The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs, a lot. Yeah, yeah, he may be fake, but we bet he’s a ton more fun than the real one.

The ensuing book, Options: The Secret Life of Steve Jobs — A Parody, is an absolute treat of humor, snark, and random rants against anyone from shareholders to Ray Kurzweil.

MRS. O

Some time ago, we interviewed Mary Tomer, who in 2008 launched Mrs-O.org — a blog chronicling Michelle Obama’s style.

That public fascination with the first lady’s fashion sense struck such a cultural chord that less than a year later, Mrs. O: The Face of Fashion Democracy hit the press. And it’s a must-read for anyone striving to understand the relationship between fashion, public persona, and popular taste.

1001 RULES FOR MY UNBORN SON

We have a strong aversion to cheesy heartstring-tuggers — cliche photos, contrived greeting cards, regurgitated quotes — of which the interwebs are full. But 1001 rules for my unborn son is positively the loveliest, most moving piece of universal-relevance-disguised-as-fatherly-advice. It combines precious nuggets of insight with just the right dose of quirk and randomness, producing powerful wisdom that doesn’t take itself too seriously — a priceless combination.

The book, Rules for My Unborn Son, is every bit as delightful.

BONUS

More recently, we were ecstatic to find out one of the smartest, most indulgent blogs out there, The Footnotes of Mad Men, got a book deal. The glossy tome, titled Mad Men Unbuttoned: A Romp Through 1960s America, is out on July 20th, but is available for pre-order now.

We can’t wait.

Missed the first five? Catch up right here.

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Blog-Turned-Book Success Stories: Part One

Maps of Utopia, posh Brooklynites, and what Whole Foods has to do with high school mixtapes.

The web may have its share of questionable content and lowest-common-denominator taste, but it has also democratized the content industry in a powerful way — with its low barrier of entry, anyone with a smart idea and excellent content can draw an audience and become the go-to authority in a niche or a publishing superstar of eclectic interestingness. And just like every waitress in LA dreams of being discovered by Hollywood, most superstar bloggers dream of getting the coveted and tangible acclaim that is a book deal.

We love nothing more than to see well-written, meticulously curated and brilliantly conceived content get the credit it deserves. And we’ve gathered proof that it is indeed possible. Here are five of our ten favorite blogs-turned-books.

BOX BOTTLE BAG

It’s no secret we’re big package design geeks — because, let’s face it, framing is everything; ideas are only as powerful as their presentation, and what are packages but presentation vehicles for the products that come in them?

For years, The Dieline has been our favorite go-to for packaging goodness. This month, they’re finally releasing the much-anticipated anthology of said goodness — Box Bottle Bag: The World’s Best Package Designs from TheDieline.com.

The book features 224 pages of richly visual, meticulously curated package design gems, including the site’s biggest hits as well as a handful of never-before-seen projects from legendary designers.

CASSETTE FROM MY EX

We’ve featured Cassette From My Ex: Stories and Soundtracks of Lost Loves before, and we even included it in our curated gift guide for books, so we won’t overelaborate.

Suffice it to say this lovely mixtape revivalist project takes the cheesiest parts of nostalgia and turns them into a wonderful celebration of youthful creative romanticism.

STUFF WHITE PEOPLE LIKE

It’s been nearly two years since Christian Lander’s brilliant, relentlessly funny-cause-it’s-true Stuff White People Like first drew critical acclaim from hipster pundits alike. The blog was so brilliant, in fact, that it got a book deal a mere three months after its launch, a pace of success that’s practically unheard of.

Wittily written and often surprisingly insightful beneath its surface humor, Stuff White People Like: A Definitive Guide to the Unique Taste of Millions is as much a cultural portrait of a certain Obama-loving, New-Yorker-reading, Whole-Foods-shopping, Scandinavian-furniture-admiring socioeconomic subset as it is a diagnostic tool for your own chronic white-clicheness.

STRANGE MAPS

We love the geeky art-science world of cartography. So when our favorite maps blog,
Strange Maps, got a book deal, we covered it promptly.

Strange Maps: An Atlas of Cartographic Curiosities features 138 of the most fascinating, absorbing and remarkable maps from the blog’s 3-year history of culling the world’s forgotten, little-known and niche cartographic treasures. And it too made our book guide last year.

From the world as depicted in Orwell’s 1984, to a color map of Thomas More’s Utopia, to the 16th-century portrayal of California as an island where people live like the Amazons, the book is brim-full of priceless anecdotes from our collective conception of the world over the centuries.

THE SARTORIALIST

In 2005, Scott Schuman set out to photograph stylish people on the street, then began uploading these photos to a no-frills blog.

Little did Schuman, a.k.a. The Sartorialist, know that over the next few years, his blog would gain such enormous cultural traction that it would elevate him to the most influential observer of street style. TIME Magazine even named him one of the Top 100 Design Influencers.

Last year, the blog put its money where its mouth is, releasing the sleek, stylish and all-around gorgeous The Sartorialist: (Bespoke Edition). (Sure, you could settle for the paperback, but that would be like watching the Macy’s Thanksgiving parade on TV — you still get it, but half its glamor and beauty are lost.)

From Milan to Miami, Beijing to Brooklyn, the book is a global portrait of exquisite taste, an addictive and indulgent intersection of voyeurism and aesthetic appreciation.

UPDATE: Here’s Part 2, with 5 more

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