Nationally known pop-culture commentator Chuck Klosterman will appear at 7 p.m. Friday in Ballroom C of the Quaker Square Inn.
An Evening With Chuck Klosterman will include him reading from his work. In addition, his books will be available for sale and signing. Admission is free.
A former reporter and columnist for the Akron Beacon Journal, Klosterman now writes the column The Ethicist for the New York Times and is a contributing editor at Grantland, a sports and pop culture site affiliated with ESPN.
He has written six books of nonfiction: Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs; Fargo Rock City; Chuck Klosterman IV; Eating the Dinosaur; and I Wear the Black Hat: Grappling With Villains Real and Imagined. He has also written two novels, Downtown Owl and The Visible Man. Numerous e-books collect previously published essays, among them Chuck Klosterman on Sports, … on Rock, … on Pop, … on Film and Television, and … on Living and Society; some of his essays are also available as individual e-offerings.
His work has also appeared in GQ, Esquire, Spin, the Washington Post and the Guardian.
Klosterman has long offered an often unconventional view of contemporary issues, a blending of references across genres and forms, and occasional parenthetical asides, whether in service of celebrity profiles (among them Billy Joel and Britney Spears) or his own ideas.
As his resume should indicate, his style and attitude have won him admirers. There have also been detractors, and those who fall into imitation of him even as they try to understand him.
Reviewing I Wear the Black Hat in the Times, James Parker became Klosterman-like in an opening paragraph that included W.H. Auden, Limp Bizkit and the right and wrong way to begin a review of a Klosterman book. (Auden was in the wrong way, Limp Bizkit in the right one.)
“Klosterman has speculated with wild brilliance on the occult relation of David Koresh to Nirvana’s In Utero,” Parker continued. “He knows why Survivor is a more interesting show than Lost. (It reveals ‘the mendacity of the desperately average.’) ... His next book could be a work of untethered philosophy or a history of the drum machine. Or both at once, which is more his style.”