Look Down, This is Where It Must Have Happened
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- $20.99
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- $20.99
Publisher Description
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
"Hal Niedzviecki is a remarkable writer."—Margot Livesey, author of The House on Fortune Street
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Niedzviecki, author of the timely and scathing non-fiction book, The Peep Diaries, once again chooses voyeurism as a central theme in his latest short story collection. In "The Sexographer," a married man snaps pictures of randomly chosen women in the act of having sex with him for his art project. In "Real Estate," Mr. Zikowitz wants a child prostitute, even though his wife is ready to have a baby, and in "Sometime Next Sunrise," a grown son wants only to sneak away from the family vacation to have sex with his girlfriend, while his depressed father tries endlessly to take him to a theme bar called "Tequila Mockingbird." Most of these stories deliver the small, narrowly focused point-of-view of men, but the most successful, "Prenatal," is a brief portrait of a high-school girl named Charlie whose growing fetus connives to get himself aborted. For all the oddities and sexual deviance in these stories, most fail to circumvent expectation, ending abruptly and without clear resolution. Since many of these tales fall flat in both premises and characterization, perhaps voyeurism's inherent passivity is the author's biggest hurdle.
