Death to All Cheerleaders

Before he was a #1 Amazon.com bestselling humorist and a contributor to The New York Times, Esquire, Playboy, and MTV News, Marty Beckerman (“laugh-out-loud”—USA Today) was a sarcastic teenager from tropical Anchorage, Alaska, who had a column in the local newspaper and zero f***s to give. Week after week, he skewered high school rites of passage, decried adolescent superficiality, and chronicled his own hopeless attempts to get a date. In 2000, at age 17, Beckerman collected his cynical tirades into a book that went Web 1.0 viral, shipped 1,000 copies from his parents’ basement, and launched his career as a professional writer who sometimes even puts on pants before noon.

Fifteen years later, this expanded and revised edition—with 20,000 words of bonus content from 1998-2001—showcases the comedic origins of “the most famous author from Alaska,” according to Business Insider. (For the record, Beckerman—now a semi-mature adult man—no longer has a problem with cheerleaders, and even admits they’re probably okay people. We all lose our ideals eventually.)