New Bad News Stories

"New Bad News is a collection of smart, cynical micro-fictions about falling out of love with America's Hollywood dream. Its deadpan humor and ironic touches will ring especially true to Gen-X and X-ennial readers. There's an undeniable 'cool factor' to the collection; it's the sort of book that dares the reader to get all its pop-culture references. NBN is organized into five sections: 'Echo Park' is a Calvino-Prize-winning series of micro-fictions that follows a out-of-work actor trying to make it in Hollywood. The speaker applies his signature deadpan humor to chance interactions and his own downward mobility in a glamorized, parodic L.A. as he drunkenly roars through town on his motorbike (ironically, a 'Triumph'). In 'Hey, It's America,' the speaker organizes an ill-fated music festival. Readers will inevitably be reminded of other failed events ripped from the headlines (FYRE, Route 91 Harvest) as 'Hey, It's America' marries two classically American obsessions: music festivals and guns. 'American Literature' functions as an anthology of sorts, assembling a collection of short works steeped in American mythos. Characters are 'sandwich artists,' 'con artists,' or 'conceptual artists.' They aspire to write their great novel, cheat on their wives for no reason, find themselves delivering a baby in the Bethlehem Bar and Grille. 'Stop me if you've heard this one before,' a character tells his buddy: 'A priest, a rabbi, a Buddhist monk, and Donald Trump walk into a bar.' '22nd Century Man' follows the cynical tone of the earlier collection through to its natural conclusion: it is a series of prose poems written by a computer. Crafted from AI-created answers to questions posed by Padgett Powell's novel in questions, these computer-generated prose poems are surprisingly apt and revelatory. '22nd Century Man' is a literary answer to the popular Internet trend: 'I forced a computer to watch 10,000 hours of [blank].' 'Death in California,' a coda, doubles down on the L.A. parody of 'Echo Park.' Following the character Death through an accelerated, glamorized L.A., the pieces in this section retrace the steps of 'Echo Park' and occasionally intersect with the original speaker. This section heightens the absurdity of 'Echo Park' and operates as a sort of 'play within the play'"