The Last Magazine
A Novel
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3.0 • 1 Rating
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- $6.99
Publisher Description
“The funniest, most savage takedown of the American news media since Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ’72.”—The Washington Post
Michael Hastings’ untimely death at the age of thirty-three rocked the journalism community. But the New York Times bestselling author of The Operators left behind an unexpected legacy: a wickedly funny novel based on Hastings’s own journalistic experiences in the mid-2000s. Discovered in his files, the novel features a wet-behind-the-ears intern named Michael M. Hastings who must choose between his career and the truth. A searing portrait of print journalism’s last glory days, The Last Magazine earned Hastings comparisons to Evelyn Waugh and Hunter S. Thompson and stands as a testament to one of America’s most treasured reporters.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Hastings, the late journalist whose 2010 Rolling Stone profile derailed the military career of Gen. Stanley McChrystal, writes about what he knew best the world of news magazine publishing in this posthumously published first novel. In 2002, a fictional Michael Hastings is interning at the weekly Magazine (read Newsweek, where the real Hastings once worked), where he bonds with burnt-out foreign correspondent A.E. Peoria. He also becomes involved with an upstart media website, Wretched.com, which calls print journalists "dead tree-ers." But Hastings is such a passive character that readers may be drawn more to Peoria, who is forced to go on hiatus after an article he writes causes a riot in Iraq. Teaching journalism, he becomes involved with one of his students, a transsexual named Justina with an incredible backstory. Taking place roughly from the second Iraq War to Hurricane Katrina, this novel tries to recreate the last time that print magazines actually mattered. But without a strong protagonist, the novel suffers, especially in comparison to Tom Rachman's far superior The Imperfectionists. Still, there is enough here to suggest that had Hastings not died in an auto crash in 2013, he would have mastered the novel form as well as he did journalism.
