An Immigrant's Love Letter to the West

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Konstantin Kisin is a comedian and one of the hosts of the popular YouTube show Triggernometry. His first book, An Immigrant’s Love Letter to the West, examines some of the contentious themes that are covered on the show — most notably, free speech and cancel culture. “The purpose of this book,” he writes, “is to describe and diagnose the malaise afflicting western society and to offer solutions.” That malaise is western guilt.

This attitude is not given to Kisin. Despite being a very funny man, he also has what so many Russians have: what Miguel de Unamuno described as “the tragic sense of life”. It gives him an important perspective on the West at a time when the West would appear to be throwing away so much of what it has achieved. Not least the freedom of speech and thought which Kisin had not experienced in the Soviet Union but had at least expected to find in the West. First up in the flood of autumn fiction are the last two unpublished novels from the Booker longlist: Gabriel Krauze’s Who They Was (4th Estate), a hard-hitting debut set amid London gang culture, and US author Diane Cook’s The New Wilderness(Oneworld), in which a mother and child escape a polluted metropolis for a dangerous experiment in living. An Immigrant’s Love Letter to the West is Kisin’s first book, and it has evolved from his career as a comedian and podcast host. Much of it has grown out of discussions he and Foster have had with their guests, and it seems from the book that as he has spoken to other people he has developed his own thinking. Helen Macdonald, author of Vesper Flights, at her home in Hawkedon. Photograph: Sophia Evans/The Guardian High-profile, bestselling books have played a vital role in focusing opposition to the Trump presidency, from Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury to the recent broadsides fired by John Bolton and Mary Trump. Rage, Bob Woodward’s follow-up to his 2018 White House expose Fear (Simon & Schuster, September) is no doubt timed to influence voters in the November election. Other big-name political books include What Is at Stake Now by Mikhail Gorbachev (Polity, September), an exploration of global instability and renewed threats to peace, and Collateral Damage: Britain, America and Europe in the Age of Trump by former British ambassador to the US Kim Darroch (William Collins, September).There is some interesting lane-switching from Sarah Crossan, known for her brilliant YA verse novels: Here is the Beehive (Bloomsbury) brings the same form to an adult tale of love, betrayal and loss. Michel Faber, meanwhile, branches out into children’s fiction with Narnia-esque fable D: A Tale of Two Worlds (Doubleday, September). Philip Pullman’s Serpentine (Penguin, October), a previously unseen story of Lyra in the Arctic written before his current trilogy, will be gobbled up by fans.

Moving from the former USSR to the U.K., a popular YouTuber has a lot to say about the glories of the West—and the perils of mistaking microaggressions for real oppression. Of course, that’s exactly the type of fare that Kisin fans have come to appreciate from him and co-host Francis Foster on their popular program (the book even features several extended excerpts of interviews from Triggernometry). In the case of both the book and the show, a winning and endearing persona shines through: In addition to being an immigrant from a nation that suffered under a genuinely repressive regime, Kisin is also a comedian who once lost a job for his refusal to sign a speech code, meaning he possesses the unique voice and insight necessary to expose the hypocrisies, dangers, and shortcomings of both socialism and those in the West who ignorantly bash their own societies as a way to justify imposing the very top-down controls that turn a regime authoritarian. The Telegraph values your comments but kindly requests all posts are on topic, constructive and respectful. Please review our In more writerly vein, the novelist and critic Anthony Quinn has written a love-letter to the Premier League title winners in Klopp: My Liverpool Romance (Faber, November). Mary Gaitskill’s sharpness and singular honesty are in evidence in Lost Cat (Daunt, November), a book-length essay about loss, safety and fear that centres on her fostering of two siblings. Orwell prize winner Kate Clanchy has written How to Grow Your Own Poem(Picador, September), an encouragement to write verse; in similar vein, Clive James’s last book The Fire of Joy(Picador, October) is a set of personal, quintessentially Jamesian commentaries on 80 of his favourite poems. It is unclear to what degree Sasha Swire’s Diary of an MP’s Wife: Inside and Outside Power (Little, Brown, September) is an act of rebellion but it is, by all accounts, amusing, indiscreet and causing some consternation in parliament. A journalist and parliamentary researcher, Swire has for over 20 years been married to Hugo Swire, who was the Conservative MP for East Devon from 2001 to 2019. During these two decades, she has also been keeping a secret diary about life as a political plus-one, with lots of details of mansplaining and mixing with Boris Johnson, Jacob Rees-Mogg and David Cameron.In this way, the memoir is a pleasant and welcome read for those inclined to agree with Kisin’s classical liberal, pro-West, centrist vision of the world. That said, those familiar with Kisin’s viewpoint and work will find little new here—anyone looking for deep dives into the philosophical or moral roots of capitalism and democracy will instead find a recap of some of the more comical or extreme progressive and media offenses of the past several years.