If you needed a guide to our current age’s excesses and infirmities, you could do a lot worse than tagging along with Geoffrey Mak. Regularly descending into the maelstrom of drugs, fashion, sex, art, and raves, and emerging to pen limpid dispatches for The New Yorker or Paris Review, Mak remembers those nights most others would prefer to forget. His debut book, Mean Boys, a memoir in essays, shows him at his unembarrassable best, writing openly about personal indignities, musing on the idea of paranoia as our era’s defining sensibility, and even daring to show empathy for psychotic edgelords. Who better to unravel a list of his least favorite things than this maestro of the immoderate? —George Pendle
Least favorite color? Periwinkle blue.
