This attitude is shared by most of the madmen, underdogs, drunks and crackpots who populate the literary genre I call loser lit, an immensely popular but seldom identified tradition that includes Kingsley Amis' "Lucky Jim," David Gates' "Jernigan," Joyce Cary's "The Horse's Mouth," Knut Hamsun's "Hunger," J.P. Donleavy's "The Ginger Man," Elliott Baker's "A Fine Madness," Michael Chabon's "Wonder Boys," John Kennedy Toole's "A Confederacy of Dunces" and Frederick Exley's "A Fan's Notes." There are many more, but never enough.

The plot of "The Fuck-Up" follows the classic loser lit trajectory: Instead of conforming to expectations and living up to his potential, the loser screws up, gets drunk, can't seem to get it together with the right woman, makes a mess of his home life (if he has a home) and courts failure at every turn. Having no more discernible target than "the way things are" -- which oppresses him and drives him up the wall, even if he can't do anything about it -- his urge for rebellion festers in the crucible of his self-consciousness, where it mutates eventually into an incurable jones to shoot himself in the foot.

"Writing 'The Fuck-Up' was a form of purging," Nersesian told me recently. "It was like vomiting up all the shit I had to swallow: having a crappy apartment, a minimum-wage job and a critical girlfriend who rubbed my nose in my failures. I wrote it to keep from feeling sorry for myself."

I know exactly what he means. I lived a nearly identical version of the life he describes, which I survived in part by reading every loser lit book I could get my hands on. The books gave me comic relief, reassurance and companionship, as well as the joyfully subversive glee of seeing my own rebellious, self-destructive instincts acted out on the page without actually having to sink quite that low myself. I wrote my first novel, "In the Drink," as a cathartic antidote to self-pity, inspired by and in homage to the great losers who'd sustained me through those years of petty humiliations and constant low-level rage.

I've reread three of them in particular -- "The Horse's Mouth," "Lucky Jim" and "Jernigan" -- so many times that I've lost count, but every single time I'm completely riveted as the story approaches the inevitable bottoming out toward which the loser has been sliding since the opening sentence: Gulley Jimson moves into his out-of-town millionaire patron's house, allows the riffraff of London's art world to move in with him, trashes the house and sells all the furniture to buy more paints; Jim Dixon, while delivering the speech on Merrie England that he hopes will save his academic career, lapses unwittingly into a drunken but dead-on imitation of Professor Welch, his pathologically irritating boss; Peter Jernigan holds his family at gunpoint, pissing his pants but too drunk to know it. Watching things go so unbelievably wrong for these guys gives me a vicarious thrill similar to the one I get from accounts of mountain climbers running out of oxygen near the summit of Everest or suburban families being terrorized by murderous poltergeists -- while I read in the comfort and safety of my armchair.

However, and perhaps not surprisingly, book editors who encounter a loser in manuscript form aren't always eager to take a chance on the unregenerate crank. Yet the unknown loser might be the literary equivalent of the borderline-obnoxious wag no one wants anything to do with at the beginning of a party but whose unbridled originality has won over a roomful of fans by the end of the night. Famously, "A Confederacy of Dunces," Toole's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, was rejected so many times and by so many publishers that the distraught author committed suicide. Years later, "Confederacy" is on many people's favorite-book lists, providing inspiration and solace for fellow high-minded misfits.

Maya Angelou reads from "The Heart of a Woman"