Wed 9/23 @ 7PM
Chuck Klosterman has written two novels, a short story collection, and nine nonfiction books which explore cultural phenomena from insightful and unexpected angles. His debut book, Fargo Rock City: A Heavy Metal Odyssey in Rural North Dakota, delved into the roots of heavy metal’s resonance among its fans. As someone raised in rural North Dakota, he shed light on why it mattered in a way that none of the educated urban rock critics who sneered at it had ever been able to.
He took that knack for getting under the skin of ideas we take for granted into his 2016 book, But What If We’re Wrong: Thinking About the Present as if It Were the Past, exploring how mutable concepts of the truth are and his recent book Football, which looks at how the overwhelming popularity of football might vanish in the future due to changes already happening. His most recent books, Rock*: A Mainstream Alternative History of Alternative Mainstream Music, in which he fantasizes that the Velvet Underground became the biggest and most influential band of the 20th century, the Beatles, Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin were irrelevant, and Lou Reed was bigger than Jesus. In the process he writes new roles for a host of music icons, both popular and cult-ish.
En route to national success (he lived in New York for a while and now lives in Portland) he passed through Northeast ohio for a while as a writer for the Akron Beacon Journal. He’ll be speaking at the Parma-Snow branch of the Cuyahoga County Public Library, where he’ll also be signing books. Go HERE to reserve your spot.