Synopses & Reviews
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 ground-breaking 1996 piece about his chicken McNuggets experiment, his uncensored profile of Britney Spears, and a previously unpublished short story—all recontextualized in Chuck’s unique voice with new intros, outros, segues, and masterful footnotes.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.
Review
"Klosterman's writing is funny and smart, if not so new or earth shattering, and that, after all, is pop culture." Booklist
Review
"Chuck Klosterman IV has its finest moments when the author is sympathetically hearing out the Method-mad actor Val Kilmer, asking a baffled Britney Spears to contemplate her own sex appeal and zipping around Dublin in order to grapple with a riddle that will live as long as music itself: is Bono full of it?" New York Times
Review
"[P]ractical but not necessary, useful rather than enlightening." Los Angeles Times
Synopsis
The pop culture obsessive voice of his generation returns with a collection compiled from ten years of essays, opinions, theories, and hypothetical questions, covering everything from robots to Radiohead.
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 new fiction. There's an introduction, but no footnotes. Well, there's a footnote in the introduction, but none in the story.
About the Author
Charles John "Chuck" Klosterman is an American pop-culture journalist, critic, and essayist. He was raised on a farm near Wyndmere, North Dakota and graduated from the University of North Dakota in 1994. After college he was a journalist in Fargo and later an arts critic for the Akron Beacon Journal in Akron, Ohio before moving to New York in 2003.
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