John Sutherland on the ass-kicking genre sweeping the nation

Genres mushroom up so fast in the superheated (and dung-rich) soil of the book world that it's a job finding names for them. Recent arrivals include Me-moirs (think Vic Reeves), Kmart realism (fiction that reads like a shopping list), poop fiction (go figure) and tart noir (think Lauren Henderson).

A specifically American genre currently making headlines is "fratire" or "frat lit" (think college lacrosse teams). Leading the pack is The Alphabet of Manliness by "Maddox". The cover features a Conan figure beating the shit out of a gorilla. The contents cover "A for ass-kicking", "B for Boner", "C for copping a feel", and so on. N is for Chuck Norris (one of many hints that Maddox may be as much into leg-pulling as ass-kicking).

Maddox offers an elaborate (and genuinely amusing) entry on urinal etiquette and a typically in-your-face (or next best target) instruction on drop kicking: "Since it is unacceptable to hit a woman (unless she is a feminist, in which case she is begging for it) it presents a difficulty to put them in their place when need be. The best way is a head-butt to the ovaries."

The Alphabet of Manliness jostles with a scrum of other testosterone-driven works such as Tucker Max's I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell and Dan Indante's The Complete A**hole's Guide to Handling Chicks. Hilariously, the New York Times has placed Maddox's socio-thuggery in its "Advice Bestsellers" chart, alongside pious works on practical theology and the achievement of thin thighs.

In the straight non-fiction lists, Ann Coulter's Godless occupies the number-one spot. Her super-bitchery has clear affinities with Maddox's ultra-macho. Coulter recommends that immigration officers should be issued with cattle prods for visitors to God's Country from the godless Middle East, and has raised storms of protest from despised liberals by describing the 9/11 widows as "millionaire witches".

Both Godless and The Alphabet have springboarded to sales success from hugely popular websites. Maddox claims 100 million hits on his immodestly entitled www. thebestpageintheuniverse.com. The Alphabet made the number-one spot on Amazon's advance sales chart when he began to puff it on his site before publication. It's clear that there is a vast amount of blogbuzz about Coulter's and Maddox's books, almost all favourable. They kick ass; the blogosphere likes that.

"Maddox" is, in fact, the nom de web of George Ouzounian, an Armenian-descended computer programmer, resident in Salt Lake City. He likes Shostakovich and is severe on idiots who mail in to his website inquiring whether, for example, it's "OK for guys in military uniform to rape chicks?" Ouzounian, one deduces, is less the laureate of the big swishing dick than a satirist. He himself argues that his book, for all its rhetorical violence, is harmless because that kind of thing "isn't real any more". Nor, as it happens, is the college fraternity house - an institution which (at last) is going the way of the Wild West Saloon. I'll drink to that.

"The Alphabet of Manliness" is published in the UK by Penguin

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