Look Down, This is Where It Must Have Happened

by Hal Niedzviecki

Overview

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

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780872865518
Publisher:	City Lights Books
Publication date:	04/19/2011
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	152
File size:	167 KB

About the Author

Hal Niedzviecki is a writer, speaker and teacher. His work is known for challenging preconceptions and confronting readers with the offenses of everyday life. He writes and thinks about the effects of mass media, pop culture and consumer technology on individual life and society. He is the author of books of nonfiction and fiction, most recently the collection of short stories Look Down, This is Where it Must Have Happened (City Lights Books) and the nonfiction books Trees On Mars: Our Obsession with the Future (Seven Stories Press) and The Peep Diaries: How We're Learning to Love Watching Ourselves and Our Neighbors (City Lights Books). The Peep Diaries was made into a television documentary entitled Peep Culture produced for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. Niedzviecki is the current fiction editor and the founder of Broken Pencil, the magazine of zine culture and the independent arts. He edited the magazine from 1995 to 2002. Hal’s writing has appeared in newspapers, periodicals and journals across the world including The New York Times Magazine, The Guardian, Playboy, the Utne Reader, The Globe and Mail, The National Post, The Walrus and Geist. Niedzviecki is committed to exploring the human condition through provocative fiction and non-fiction that charts the media saturated terrain of ever shifting multiple identities at the heart of our fragmenting age.

Editorial Reviews

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. (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly

"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

From the Publisher

"Fiction writer, social critic, and founding editor of indie literary magazine Broken Pencil Hal Niedzviecki has done it all. He has built his reputation on his ability to smartly skewer social conventions, picking apart aspects of our culture and revealing their absurdities. In his latest book, Look Down, This Is Where It Must Have Happened, Niedzviecki turns again to fiction, with a collection of 13 short stories that are both topical and timely. From terrorism to abortion, the subjects he grapples with are at the forefront of the public consciousness, as though ripped straight from today's blog posts, Twitter feeds, and status updates." (Paul J. Comeau)

Verbicide

"With dark humor and deep compassion, Niedzviecki, cultural critic and author of 'The Peep Diaires' (2009), delivers a haunting collection peopled by characters on the verge of despair. . . . Like David Means' stories, these convention-defying examples written in tight, punchy prose examine the fine lines between love and obsession, failure and success. A moving and amusingly varied collection."

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