“One of my favorite things about Chuck Klosterman is that when he has a new book come out, he usually appears on a handful of podcasts.
Here’s a quick back and forth, paraphrased, from one of those interviews:
Chuck: I was trying to write a set of stories that were exactly 1000 words apiece.
Interviewer: That sounds like a very Chuck Klosterman thing to do.
Chuck: Well, I am Chuck Klosterman.
This book seems like a departure, but it’s not. Imagine the hypothetical questions from Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs, but narrative-ized. A little more world is built around them, and you get a better sense of the strangeness of the scenarios. But that’s what the stories are more like: scenarios. They aren’t traditional short stories where some stuff happens and people feel ways about that stuff (sidebar: I love short stories, but I think I just wrote the most apt description of them ever). They start as a premise, explore the premise a bit, and then usually leave things hanging. Sometimes in service of exploring a deeper question, sometimes not. Sometimes they’re a little Twilight-Zone-y with a twist, and sometimes not.
In the same interview, Klosterman said, no bullshit, this was the most fun he had writing a book since the first one, and I believe it. Because it’s some of the most fun I’ve had reading him. “