For people who had doubts about Neal Pollack's satirical stick-to-itiveness, one addition to the soft-cover "sell-out" edition of his "anthology" should vanquish them. "Breaking News: One Against the Taliban"--one of several new pieces in the paperback--is the acme of Pollack's periodic style, which exists to skewer the name-dropping pomposity of the "new" journalism, which is to say "literary" journalism, which is to say all journalism in which the word "I" is the most prominent subject.

Pollack's short essays capture the tone and language of their target form with savage accuracy (sample titles: "I Am Friends with a Working Class Black Woman," "The Albania of My Existence") as he crafts the hilarious persona of "the greatest living writer." This counter-Pollack is a synthesis of every writer's idful fantasy--corresponding with "Bunny" Wilson; rubbing shoulders with Salinger, Hemingway, Ginsberg, and all his other lessers; and, most colorfully, spilling over with (imaginary) titles from his (imaginary) CV, including Killing People in the Service of Empire, Europe: The Forgotten Continent, Listening to Silence, and my favorite, Sad Bells of the Adriatic.

But "One Against the Taliban" is particularly brilliant because it puts its satirical money where its mouth is. Pollack's pieces from McSweeney's (which published the original "indie label" version of the anthology) have always been masterfully absurd, but their satirical scope has been somewhat narrow, given that Vanity Fair-style personality journalism isn't exactly an enemy of the people in itself--though it can certainly use the ego deflation. "Taliban" raises the stakes by taking on the strain of patriotic moisture that infected almost all post-9/11 writing (including the stuff that appeared in this paper).

A lot of people made the stupid claim that 9/11 spelled the death of irony. Pollack's Anthology, and especially the "Taliban" piece, makes a welcome argument that in fact, it signaled an ironic rebirth. SEAN NELSON