Viking Canada invites you to celebrate the launch of John Semley's Hater.

John Semley is a pop culture and media critic who regularly writes arts features and reviews. He is a film and TV columnist for CBC's q, and frequent contributor to The Globe and Mail and Maclean's. His work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Esquire, The A.V. Club, Salon, Now, The Walrus, Toronto Life, and more. He is the author of This Is a Book About Kids in the Hall. He lives in Toronto.

About Hater

A timely manifesto urging us to think critically, form opinions, and then argue them with gusto.

Hater begins from a simple premise: that it's good to hate things. Not people or groups or benign belief systems, but things. More to the point, it's good to hate the things everyone seems to like.
Scan the click-baiting headlines of your favorite news or pop-culture website and you're likely to find that just about everything is, supposedly, "what we need right now." We are the victims of an unbridled, unearned optimism. And our world demands pessimism. It's vital to be contrarian--now, as they say, more than ever. Because ours is an age of calcified consensus. And we should all hate that.
In this scathing and funny rebuke of the status quo, journalist John Semley illustrates that looking for and identifying nonsense isn't just a useful exercise for society, it's also a lot of fun. But Hater doesn't just skewer terrible TV shows and hit songs--at its core it shows us how to meaningfully talk about and engage with culture, and the world. Ultimately, Hater is what we actually need right now.