John Dolan
A partial archive of his articles for the Exile is again available:
exile.ru
It includes many of his classics, as far as I can tell, such as his takedown and exposé of James Frey, the piece about Ben Okri, the brilliantly titled "Smut for the Pious", etc.
His Amazon.com reviews were also quite often a hoot, but I don't think there's any way to find many of them now.
The more focused and systematic attack on David Foster Wallace (and Eggers, and Vollmann) the Exiled published later isn't listed on the link above but can be easily found; BTW "Ramon Glazov" seems to be the pseudonym that John Dolan is yet to own up to (or maybe not; Glazov has written a positive review of one of Dolan's books, and I don't think Dolan would have that gall).
Oddly, it was the War Nerd stuff, his biggest hit, that I always had mixed feelings about. Some good insight in there, yes, but the tone was too similar to that of Cracked listicles that called a war hero "a badass". War is no joke.
Yes, at the time (and even today) I was the ideal target for Dolan's outcast posturing, and I was always (and remain so) infinitely envious of the lives of unbridled debauchery the Exiles led in Moscow back in the noughties. But there's no denying how darkly funny Dolan's articles are, and yes I do dare say it - the sheer quality of his writing.
As for his actual influence on me: it wasn't Dolan who got me into Houellebecq; that was, bizarrely, Orthofer, even though even at the time I never cared about his actual reviews - I just checked his site to get to know a few names in contemporary French fiction. But it was most certainly Dolan who led me to read Céline.
