Chuck Klosterman IV: A Decade of Curious People and Dangerous Ideas

by Chuck Klosterman

Overview

Coming off the breakthrough success of Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs and Killing Yourself to Live, bestselling pop culture guru Chuck Klosterman assembles his best work previously unavailable in book form—including the groundbreaking 1996 piece about his chicken McNuggets experiment, his uncensored profile of Britney Spears, and a previously unpublished short story—all recontextualized in Chuck’s unique voice with new intros, outros, segues, and masterful footnotes.

Chuck Klosterman IV consists of three parts:

Things That Are True—Profiles and trend stories: Britney Spears, Radiohead, Billy Joel, Metallica, Val Kilmer, Bono, Wilco, the White Stripes, Steve Nash, Morrissey, Robert Plant—all with new introductions and footnotes.

Things That Might Be True—Opinions and theories on everything from monogamy to pirates to robots to super people to guilt, and (of course) Advancement—all with new hypothetical questions and footnotes.

Something That Isn’t True At All—This is old fiction. There’s a new introduction, but no footnotes. Well, there’s a footnote in the introduction, but none in the story.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780743293785
Publisher:	Scribner
Publication date:	09/05/2006
Sold by:	SIMON & SCHUSTER
Format:	eBook
Pages:	384
Sales rank:	801,401
File size:	4 MB

About the Author

Chuck Klosterman is the bestselling author of many books of nonfiction (including The Nineties, Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs, I Wear the Black Hat, and But What If We're Wrong?) and fiction (Downtown Owl, The Visible Man, and Raised in Captivity). He has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, GQ, Esquire, Spin, The Guardian, The Believer, Billboard, The A.V. Club, and ESPN. Klosterman served as the Ethicist for The New York Times Magazine for three years, and was an original founder of the website Grantland with Bill Simmons. 

Hometown:

New York, New York

Date of Birth:

June 5, 1972

Place of Birth:

Wyndmere, North Dakota

Education:

Degree in Journalism, University of North Dakota, 1994

Table of Contents

Contents

Things That Are True

Southern-Fried Sex Kitten

Bending Spoons with Britney Spears

(This Happened in) October

Mysterious Days

Call me "Lizard King." No...really. I insist.

Crazy Things Seem Normal, Normal Things Seem Crazy

1,400 Mexican Moz Fans Can't Be (Totally) Wrong

Viva Morrissey!

Chomp Chomp

The Amazing McNugget Diet

McDiculous

My Second-Favorite Canadian

The Karl Marx of the Hardwood

Deep Blue Something

That '70s Cruise

"Deep Sabbath"

In the Beginning, There Was Zoso

Not a Whole Lotta Love

Disposable Heroes

Band on the Couch

Unbuttoning the Hardest Button to Button

Garage Days Unvisited

The Ice Planet Goth

Something Wicked This Way Comes

Fitter, Happier

No More Knives

The American Radiohead

Ghost Story

Bowling for the Future (and Possibly Horse Carcasses)

Local Clairvoyants Split Over Future

But I Still Think "All for Leyna" Is Awesome

The Stranger

Someone Like You

Dude Rocks Like a Lady

Taking The Streets to the Music

Untitled Geezer Profile

Five Interesting Corpses

The Ratt Trap

How Real Is Real

The Tenth Beatle

Here's "Johnny" 207

Fargo Rock City, for Real

To Be Scene, or Not to Be Seen

Things That Might Be True

The Grizzly Hypothetical

Nemesis

The Transformation Hypothetical

Advancement

The Unknown Companion Hypothetical

I Do Not Hate the Olympics

The Dress Code Hypothetical

Three Stories Involving Pants

The Court of Public Opinion Hypothetical

Don't Look Back in Anger

The Brain Pill Hypothetical

Not Guilty

The Life Plagiarist Hypothetical

Cultural Betrayal

The Universal Morality Hypothetical

Monogamy

The Joe Six-Pack Hypothetical

Certain Rock Bands You Probably Like

The Hitler Theft Hypothetical

Pirates

The Robot War Hypothetical

Robots

The Cannibal's Quandary

Super People

The Apocalypse Hypothetical

Television

The General Tso's Hypothetical

Singularity

Something That Isn't True at All

You Tell Me

Acknowledgments

Index

Editorial Reviews

Confections like Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs earned high praise for author Chuck Klosterman. The Los Angeles Times Book Review called his works "junk food for the soul" and People installed him as "the new Hunter S. Thompson." Not to be silenced by such accolades, Klosterman returns with a fresh batch of high-adrenaline riffs on heavy metal music, trash TV, sports, and sex. High-spirited and unpredictable.

Fans of Klosterman's Ritalin-paced pop culture criticism (Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs) will eagerly devour this collection of previously published essays. Whether investigating Latino fans of British pop icon Morrissey, interviewing female tribute bands like Lez Zeppelin and AC/DShe or eating nothing but Chicken McNuggets for a week, Klosterman is always entertaining and often insightful. But other than a sympathetic profile of Billy Joel, Klosterman rarely strays from his favorite topics: heavy metal music, television, sports and sex. Perhaps this career overview is his way of recycling old themes into some kind of new "defining endeavor," as he describes the title inspired by Led Zeppelin IV (as it is unofficially called). This would make perfect sense given his work so far: Fargo Rock City was an original and confident debut (like Led Zeppelin I); his newest book definitely has kick, but overall it's a mixed bag of collected essays-strong and not-so-strong performances-its parts are greater than the whole. (Sept.) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Publishers Weekly

From trend pieces ("Things That Are True") to opinion pieces ("Things That Might Be True") to a short story ("Things That Are Not True at All"). With a 15-city tour. Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

"One of America's top cultural critics." — Entertainment Weekly

"Mr. Klosterman makes good, smart company." — The New York Times

"He's perfect junk food for the soul." — Los Angeles Times Book Review

"The reigning Kasparov of pop culture wits-matching." — San Francisco Chronicle

"Klosterman is like the new Hunter S. Thompson." — People

"Ferociously clever and ferociously self-deprecating." — Evening Standard (London)

"He's killing his artform, in hopes of reviving it." — The Onion A.V. Club

From the Publisher

The author reads various articles he’s written for “smart” publications that amusingly record his observations of cultural ephemera. A specialist in inconsequence, he writes glibly about the passing scene in clever phrases. This volume includes profiles of celebrities, opinion pieces, and a smattering of short fiction. His vocal skill is less felicitous than his writing. On the positive side, he adopts a light, chatty tone and a brisk pace that nicely complement his text. He does have some flair as a raconteur. But his scratchy voice grates on this reviewer’s nerves, as does his sloppy diction and air of in-crowd smugness. Perhaps a younger trend-conscious listener will have more appreciation for Klosterman’s virtues and less impatience with his faults. Y.R. © AudioFile 2006, Portland, Maine

DEC 06/JAN 07 - AudioFile