Nothing Happened and Then It Did: A Chronicle in Fact and Fiction - Softcover

Silverstein, Jake

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0393339947 ISBN 13: 9780393339949

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, 2011

Synopsis

Rare Book

About this title

Review:

A hilarious, subtle, and empathetic examination of writing and identity.--Michael Washburn

This book (Is it a novel? Or a memoir? Both? Something else?) is hilarious, poetic, lovely, and disturbing. It's filled with ghosts, bad poets with great hearts, treasure hunts, death-wish race-car drivers, and Mexican kids who weep when denied the chance to eat at McDonald's. It's a eulogy for dead American towns, dead American ideas, and dead American jobs. It crosses every aesthetic border as it crosses geographic, racial, and economic borders. You'll devour it.--Sherman Alexie

[O]ne of the weirdest books I have ever read... Greatly entertaining and extremely funny.--Tom Bissell

A marriage of gonzo journalism and magical realism. . . . An enchanting account of the apprentice's sorcery.--Steven G. Kellman

Nothing Happened and Then It Did cleverly eludes categorization. Part new journalism, part old-fashioned bildungsroman, by turns whimsical and edifying, very funny yet deeply profound, it is a creation both strange and rare. Jake Silverstein is the book's author and hapless hero, a character composite not unlike Cervantes and his fictional sidekick Sancho Panza. The great accomplishment is that the reader, in the end, does not care what is fact, what is fiction, because she has happily arrived at that much more elusive grail: truth.--Antonya Nelson

Silverstein's adventures and prose are first-rate.--Rob Merrill

About the Author:

Jake Silverstein is the editor of Texas Monthly and a contributing editor at Harper's. He lives in Austin, Texas.

About this edition

• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 0393339947
• ISBN 13: 9780393339949
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 232