I'm going to give up on this one. Life's too short to listen to all this foul-mouthed egotistical babble.
I get the point, the author inhabits the caricature of himself to play with your mind and undermine the foundations of "literature" and the publishing industry, but I just got bored. ( )

It was my birthday in 2002. I had rec'd a gift card to a local indie bookseller ( we miss you Hawley-Cooke) and I happily went to buy this. They were sold out. I bought instead Prague by Arthur Phillips which was quite the rave at the time and had the added interest of my impending trip to Eastern Europe. A friend of mine was cheating on his wife at the time. he went to another local and bought me a copy. He was a good friend. Was he buying my silence about his activities? I first read Prague and then (20 days?) later experienced a twist in its plot with my own soon-to-be wife in Budapest. Hours after finishing Phillips' Prague, I devoured In The Hand of Dante. Everything both stolid and electric about both Tosches and Dante remains present and pulsating throughout the entire novel, an agreeable amalgamation of literary homage and sinister thriller. ( )

Just read the summary on the cover, it's more interesting. ( )

This book annoyed me from the very first chapter and it never got any better. I've got nothing against swearing but when every second word is fuck then it gets to be a bit much. ( )

A bit confused by all the separate narrative strands at the beginning and it's slow going - especially with the seemingly autobiographical background. Is Tosches as bitter/angry as the book's character named "Nick Tosches"? Maybe he assumes I'm more intelligent than I am, but it seems disjointed to me. I felt myself wanting to skip over the sections in which Dante appears and found Tosches' rendering of some kind of Middle English often unintelligible. If I'm supposed to look up all the Italian and Latin bits - forget it! ( )