Nothing Happened and Then it Did: A Chronicle in Fact and Fiction

Front Cover
W. W. Norton & Company, 2010 - Fiction - 231 pages
The timing couldn't be better--as scandals erupt over journalists and memoirists who've cooked their books--for a work that explores our difficulty in separating fact and fiction, while explicitly demonstrating how they differ and what they share.

In prose so fine and wry it makes the back of your neck prickle, Jake Silverstein narrates a journey he undertook through the American Southwest and Mexico, looking to become a journalist. His picaresque travels are filled with beguiling and hilarious characters: nineteenth-century author Ambrose Bierce; an unknown group of famous poets; a twenty-first-century treasure hunter in the Gulf of Mexico; an ex-Nazi mechanic shepherding an old Mexican road race; a stenographer who records every passing moment; and various incarnations of the trickster devil.

As bold, ambitious, and funny as it is unconventional, Nothing Happened and Then It Did is a deep and lasting pleasure.
 

Contents

Section 1
1
Section 2
3
Section 3
8
Section 4
11
Section 5
13
Section 6
17
Section 7
22
Section 8
26
Section 19
101
Section 20
104
Section 21
119
Section 22
127
Section 23
129
Section 24
137
Section 25
144
Section 26
145

Section 9
27
Section 10
39
Section 11
55
Section 12
57
Section 13
60
Section 14
63
Section 15
68
Section 16
77
Section 17
83
Section 18
93
Section 27
164
Section 28
171
Section 29
176
Section 30
188
Section 31
193
Section 32
206
Section 33
220
Section 34
223
Section 35
228
Copyright

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About the author (2010)

Jake Silverstein is the editor of Texas Monthly and a contributing editor at Harper's. He lives in Austin, Texas.

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