Daryl Haney - Literary Career

Literary Career

While living in Belgrade, Haney began work on a novel, Banned for Life, which would take him nine years to complete, and for which he adopted the pen name D. R. Haney. Haney has explained the pen name by saying that he was embarrassed by some of the films on his resume: "I didn’t feel I could put my name on . I’d destroyed my name, or so I thought. At the same time, it would’ve killed me to use a pseudonym. How could I use a false name on a work so close to my heart?"

Banned for Life is about the search for a mysteriously vanished punk-rock icon, and the book, published by Vancouver's And/Or Press in May 2009, was praised by underground-music journals such as Maximum RocknRoll, Razorcake, and Big Wheel. The Big Wheel review referred to the book as a "thinly disguised memoir," about which Haney later said, "It’s not. I tried to make it read like one, but despite some biographical overlap, the narrator and I have led very different lives."

Following the publication of Banned for Life, Haney began to contribute essays to Brad Listi's literary website The Nervous Breakdown, quickly becoming one of the site's most popular writers. In October 2010, Subversia, a collection of Haney's essays for The Nervous Breakdown, was published as the inaugural title of the site's imprint, TNB Books.