Look Down, This is Where It Must Have Happened - Softcover

Niedzviecki, Hal

3.28

25 ratings by Goodreads

9780872865396: Look Down, This is Where It Must Have Happened

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0872865398 ISBN 13: 9780872865396

Publisher: City Lights Publishers, 2011

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The acclaimed author of The Peep Diaries and Hello, I'm Special returns to fiction, and delivers a mind-altering collection of short stories that confront the hypocrisies, humiliations and hilarities of modern life. The foibles of the 21st-century ego are on full view in this romp through social conventions imaginative, offbeat stories that confront society's intractable dilemmas and deftly capture the zeitgeist of our fractured times.

*An undergraduate gets in way over his head when a class assignment to start a terrorist organization goes viral

*A pregnant 10th-grader struggles with her fetus's insistence that she abort him before both their lives are ruined.

*A man trying to come to terms with the death of a friend becomes obsessed with a funeral home's online braodcasts.

*A mortgage broker gets lost between the Web and the real world in pursuit of a pornography-induced fantasy.

Look Down, This is Where It Must Have Happened is a biting satire of nostalgia, a send-up of the way highschool-era friendships can permanently choke off the possibility of adulthood.

"Witty and wise." San Francisco Chronicle

"An equally gifted fiction writer and social critic." Tikkun

"There's tons of talent here." NOW Magazine

"Hall Niedzviecki is a remarkable writer." Margot Livesey, author of The House on Fortune Street

Hal Niedzviecki is a writer, speaker and teacher. His work is known for challenging preconceptions and confronting readers with the offenses of everyday life. He writes and thinks about the effects of mass media, pop culture and consumer technology on individual life and society. He is the author of books of nonfiction and fiction, most recently the collection of short stories Look Down, This is Where it Must Have Happened (City Lights Books) and the nonfiction books Trees On Mars: Our Obsession with the Future (Seven Stories Press) and The Peep Diaries: How We're Learning to Love Watching Ourselves and Our Neighbors (City Lights Books). The Peep Diaries was made into a television documentary entitled Peep Culture produced for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. Niedzviecki is the current fiction editor and the founder of Broken Pencil, the magazine of zine culture and the independent arts. He edited the magazine from 1995 to 2002. Hal’s writing has appeared in newspapers, periodicals and journals across the world including The New York Times Magazine, The Guardian, Playboy, the Utne Reader, The Globe and Mail, The National Post, The Walrus and Geist. Niedzviecki is committed to exploring the human condition through provocative fiction and non-fiction that charts the media saturated terrain of ever shifting multiple identities at the heart of our fragmenting age.

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About the Author:

Hal Niedzviecki is the founder of Broken Pencil magazine and has published numerous works of social commentary, including The Peep Diaries: How We're Learning to Love Watching Ourselves and Our Neighbors, Hello I'm Special: How Individuality Became the New Conformity and We Want Some Too: Underground Desire and the Reinvention of Mass Culture. He has also published two various works of fiction, including The Program, a novel, and Smell It, a collection of stories.

Review:

"In this collection Niedzviecki offers a dizzying mix of tales that demonstrate how we are turning less humane in an increasingly media-soaked world...Absurdity abuts tragedy in this remarkable collection." --The Winnipeg Free Press

These stories are refreshing for their daring and directness, and Niedzviecki's unrelenting drive to expose the hearts that still beat inside his characters, regardless of how damaged or stained. --Quill & Quire

"Tautly controlled prose...Niedzviecki refuses to play it safe...Superb." --Now Magazine

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