Chuck Klosterman IV: A Decade of Curious People and Dangerous Ideas

Chuck Klosterman

Simon and Schuster, Sep 5, 2006 - Social Science - 384 pages

Coming off the breakthrough success of Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs and Killing Yourself to Live, bestselling pop culture guru Chuck Klosterman assembles his best work previously unavailable in book form—including the groundbreaking 1996 piece about his chicken McNuggets experiment, his uncensored profile of Britney Spears, and a previously unpublished short story—all recontextualized in Chuck’s unique voice with new intros, outros, segues, and masterful footnotes.

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.

Contents

• SouthernFried Sex Kitten: 11
• This Happened in October: 21
• Call me Lizard King No really I insist: 33
• Chomp Chomp: 57
• My SecondFavorite Canadian: 67
• Deep Blue Something: 75
• Deep Sabbath: 89
• Disposable Heroes: 101
• Unbuttoning the Hardest Button to Button: 113
• The Ice Planet Goth: 121
• Fitter Happier: 131
• The American Radiohead: 143
• Bowling for the Future and Possibly Horse Carcasses: 155
• Still Think All for Leyna Is Awesome: 163
• Debriefing Agent Zero: 175
• Someone Like You: 183
• Taking The Streets to the Music: 195
• Five Interesting Corpses: 207
• Fargo Rock City for Real: 221
• The Two Motives Hypothetical: 233
• The Grizzly Hypothetical: 243
• The Transformation Hypothetical: 249
• The Unknown Companion Hypothetical: 255
• The Dress Code Hypothetical: 261
• The Court of Public Opinion Hypothetical: 271
• The Brain Pill Hypothetical: 277
• The Life Plagiarist Hypothetical: 283
• The Universal Morality Hypothetical: 289
• The Joe SixPack Hypothetical: 295
• The Hitler Theft Hypothetical: 301
• The Robot War Hypothetical: 307
• The Cannibals Quandary: 313
• The Future Prediction Quandary: 319
• The Desert Island Hypothetical: 325
• The Telekinetic Hypothetical: 331
• The Stereotypical Jesus Hypothetical: 337
• The Apocalypse Hypothetical: 343
• The General Tsos Hypothetical: 357
• You Tell Me: 364
• Acknowledgments: 399

About the author

Chuck Klosterman is the bestselling author of many books of nonfiction (including The Nineties, Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs, I Wear the Black Hat, and But What If We're Wrong?) and fiction (Downtown Owl, The Visible Man, and Raised in Captivity). He has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, GQ, Esquire, Spin, The Guardian, The Believer, Billboard, The A.V. Club, and ESPN. Klosterman served as the Ethicist for The New York Times Magazine for three years, and was an original founder of the website Grantland with Bill Simmons.

Bibliographic information

• Title: Chuck Klosterman IV: A Decade of Curious People and Dangerous Ideas
• Author: Chuck Klosterman
• Publisher: Simon and Schuster, 2006
• ISBN: 0743293789, 9780743293785
• Length: 384 pages
• Subjects: Biography & Autobiography / Literary Figures; Social Science / General; Social Science / Popular Culture