Books about Klosterman from Amazon.com

There's quite a bit of intelligent analysis and thought-provoking insight packed into the pages of Chuck Klosterman's Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs, which is a little surprising considering how darn stupid most of Klosterman's subject matter actually is. Klosterman, one of the few members of the so-called "Generation X" to proudly embrace that label and the stereotypical image of disaffected slackers that often accompanies it, takes the reader on a witty and highly entertaining tour through portions of pop culture not usually subjected to analysis and presents his thoughts on Saved by the Bell, Billy Joel, amateur porn, MTV's The Real World, and much more. It would be easy in dealing with such subject matter to simply pile on some undergraduate level deconstruction, make a few jokes, and have yourself a clever little book. But Klosterman goes deeper than that, often employing his own life spent as a member of the lowbrow target demographic to measure the cultural impact of his subjects. While the book never quite lives up to the use of the word "manifesto" in the title (it's really more of a survey mixed with elements of memoir), there is much here to entertain and illuminate, particularly passages on the psychoses and motivations of breakfast cereal mascots, the difference between Celtic fans and Laker fans, and The Empire Strikes Back. Sections on a Guns n' Roses tribute band, The Sims, and soccer feel more like magazine pieces included to fill space than part of a cohesive whole. But when you're talking about a book based on a section of cultural history so reliant on a lack of attention span, even the incongruities feel somehow appropriate. --John Moe.
Price: $5.85 [Notify me when price goes down.]

New York Times Bestselling Author Chuck Klosterman's First Novel

Somewhere in North Dakota, there is a town called Owl that isn't there. Disco is over, but punk never happened They don't have cable. They don't really have pop culture, unless you count grain prices and alcoholism People work hard and then they die. They hate the government and impregnate teenage girls. But that's not nearly as awful as it sounds; in fact, sometimes it's perfect.

Mitch Hrlicka lives in Owl. He plays high school football and worries about his weirdness, or lack thereof. Julia Rabia just moved to Owl. She gets free booze and falls in love with a self-loathing bison farmer who listens to Goats Head Soup. Horace Jones has resided in Owl for seventy-three years. He consumes a lot of coffee, thinks about his dead wife, and understands the truth. They all know each other completely, except that they've never met.

Like a colder, Reagan-era version of The Last Picture Show fused with Friday Night Lights, Chuck Klosterman's Downtown Owl is the unpretentious, darkly comedic story of how it feels to exist in a community where rural mythology and violent reality are pretty much the same thing. Loaded with detail and unified by a (very real) blizzard, it's technically about certain people in a certain place at a certain time...but it's really about a problem. And the problem is this: What does it mean to be a normal person? And there is no answer. But in Downtown Owl, what matters more is how you ask the question..
Price: $16.32 [Notify me when price goes down.]

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF SEX, DRUGS, AND COCOA PUFFS

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..
Price: $8.45 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Empirically proving that -- no matter where you are -- kids wanna rock, this is Chuck Klosterman's hilrious memoir of growing up as a shameless metalhead in Wyndmere, North Dakotoa (population: 498). With a voice like Ace Frehley's guitar, Klosterman hacks his way through hair-band history, beginning with that fateful day in 1983 when his older brother brought home Mötley Crüe's Shout at the Devil. The fifth-grade Chuck wasn't quite ready to rock -- his hair was too short and his farm was too quiet -- but he still found a way to bang his nappy little head. Before the journey was over, he would slow-dance to Poison, sleep innocently beneath satanic pentagrams, lust for Lita Ford, and get ridiculously intellectual about Guns N' Roses. C'mon and feel his noize..
Price: $6.97 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Pac-Man. Frogger Super Mario Bros. These classic videogames are burned into the collective consciousness of an entire generation, thanks to countless hours spent at pizza parlors and bowling alleys across the country. Now artists such as Gary Baseman, Tim Biskup, and Ashley Wood put their memories to paper, canvas, and wood to create original works of art inspired by the art of the videogame. Chuck Klosterman shares his thoughts in his distinctively insightful and entertaining style in a foreword on how videogames created a new playground for artistic expression. With more than 100 thought-provoking, amusing, and simply fun pieces of original art, i am 8-bit is a pixilated stroll down memory lane..
Price: $11.49 [Notify me when price goes down.]

For some people, happy hour is never enough

This is a book about escape. It's also about laughing gas. And bourbon and dope and sex and mushrooms and every other vice millions of us indulge in to forget our jobs, the office, and the stifling, corporate caricatures we're forced to become for paychecks. This is a book about a decade lost in a senseless career no one likes and all the ridiculous things I did to run from it. In the end, it's probably your story as much as mine. We're everywhere. We just can't say it out loud.

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Price: $16.29 [Notify me when price goes down.]

New York's Greenwich Village, "the most significant square mile in American cultural history" and "home of half the talent and half the eccentricity in the country," is the subject of Ross Wetzsteon's Republic of Dreams, an enthusiastic and rigorous biography of place. From the Village sprung American socialism, gay liberation, the YMCA, the American Civil Liberties Union, The Reader's Digest, the phrase "I heard it through the grapevine," the Colt .45 revolver, and America's first night court, for starters. It was in the Village where Kahlil Gibran wrote The Prophet and the buffalo nickel was designed. Wetzsteon is primarily interested in the place between the years 1910 (when, he says, it became a "self-conscious bohemian and radical community") and 1960, when cultural boundaries "blurred" and the "hegemony of 'the normal'" disappeared. This is not a "walking tour" of famous hangouts so much as a portrait built on a chronological series of richly detailed biographies of Village denizens renowned, notorious, and relatively obscure, including Max Eastman, E.E. Cummings, Jackson Pollock and other abstract expressionists, a Who's Who of American feminists, Eugene O'Neill, and Mabel Dodge. Wetzsteon, who died in 1998, revels in the Village's inherent chaos, contradictions, and mutation, and never succumbs to "golden age" nostalgia. As his daughter writes in an afterword, "the Village is dead; long live the Village." Republic of Dreams, eminently readable, unflaggingly perceptive, and immaculately researched, is, arguably, the seminal study to date of America's most fertile literary, artistic, and political geographical dot. --H. O'Billovich.
Price: $9.59 [Notify me when price goes down.]

He’s been called a journeyman Even Paul wouldn’t dispute that classification Regardless, Bill Simmons, ESPN.com’s “The Sports Guy,” has said of Paul Shirley, “We could finally have an answer to the question ‘What would it be like if one of our friends was an NBA player?”

There’s no denying that Paul Shirley is the closest thing pro basketball’s got to Odysseus. In Homeric fashion, he has logged time practically everywhere in the roundball universe, from six NBA cities to pro leagues in Spain and Greece to North America’s pro ball Siberia, the minor leagues. Hell, he’s even played in the real Siberia. And in Can I Keep My Jersey?, Shirley finally puts down roots long enough to deliver one of the great locker-room chronicles of the modern age.

With sharp elbows and an even sharper wit, Shirley–whose writings have been described as “wildly entertaining” by The Wall Street Journal–drops hilarious commentary, revealing which teams have the best cheerleaders (he’s spent many a time-out watching them ply their trade), why Christ is rapidly becoming every team’s “sixth man,” and even the best ways to get bloodstains out of your game uniform, using only an ordinary bar of soap and a hotel bathroom sink.

From sharing the court with Kobe and Shaq to perusing the food court at some mall in a bush-league burg; from taking pregame layups to getting laid out by a stray knee from an NBA power forward; from hopping a limo to the team’s charter jet to dashing to catch the van home from a B-league game in Tijuana, Shirley dishes on what it’s like to try to make it as a professional athlete. Can I Keep My Jersey? is a rollicking, thoughtful, even thought-provoking insider’s look at a pro baller’s life on the fringe. Like Jim Bouton’s Ball Four or John Feinstein’s A Season on the Brink, Shirley’s odyssey deserves to find a home on every sports fan’s bookshelf..
Price: $11.90 [Notify me when price goes down.]