Synopsis
Q: What is this book about?
A: Well, that's difficult to say. I haven't read it yet--I've just picked it up and casually glanced at the back cover. There clearly isn't a plot. I've heard there's a lot of stuff about time travel in this book, and quite a bit about violence and Garth Brooks and why Germans don't laugh when they're inside grocery stores. Ralph Nader and Ralph Sampson play significant roles. I think there are several pages about Rear Window and college football and Mad Men and why Rivers Cuomo prefers having sex with Asian women. Supposedly there's a chapter outlining all the things the Unabomber was right about, but perhaps I'm misinformed.
Q: Is there a larger theme?
A: Oh, something about reality. "What is reality," maybe? No, that's not it. Not exactly. I get the sense that most of the core questions dwell on the way media perception constructs a fake reality that ends up becoming more meaningful than whatever actually...
The New York Times - Gregory Beyer
In the course of the collection's 13 essays, Klosterman burrows into overexposed but underexplored departments of American pop culture. Declaring himself "post-taste," he evaluates not the merits of certain phenomena but the ways we "use" them.