“But then our lives outgrew television, became more interesting than the scripts.” -- from The Nostalgia Echo
Mickey Hess’ The Nostalgia Echo: A Novel
ISBN 10: 1-936196-08-5
ISBN 13: 978-1-936196-08-1
Binding: Tradepaper
Size: 5x8
331 pages
Pub Date: December 1, 2011
Price: US $14.95
An Associate Professor of English at Rider University, Mickey Hess is well-known
as a professional blurb artist via his online column “I Will Blurb Any Book Within
24 Hours” at The Rumpus. He is also the author of six other books, including Is Hip
Hop Dead? The Past, Present, and Future of America’s Most Wanted Music,Hip Hop in
America: A Regional Guide, and Big Wheel at the Cracker Factory.
Nostalgia is coming back around. A professional narrator named Gene is searching
for his birth mother, armed with nothing but a Polaroid photograph of her at a 1976
book release party for Dr. Everett Barnes’ Nostalgia: Its Origins and Attributes.
Dr. Barnes, meanwhile, is about to become famous for a book he wrote thirty years
ago.
Nostalgia – once considered a potentially-fatal disease when it was first diagnosed
in the 17th century – has been relegated to the realm of the sentimental, but based
on Dr. Barnes’ theories, people are beginning to reconsider its dangerous effects:
doctors return to the old cures; pharmaceutical companies solicit Dr. Barnes to endorse
the new anti-nostalgic medications they have developed; and Gene seeks out Dr. Barnes
to somehow realign the missing pieces of his past into a story with a beginning,
middle, and ending.
"The Nostalgia Echo is the best book you will read this year, or any year: the exact
antidote to all those tired, humorless, beige-colored novels of recent memory, the
writing here pops with both a dazzling intelligence and a devastating depth of character.
Mr. Hess carries on in the great tradition of Vonnegut, D. Barthelme, and every other
genius literary madman."-- Joe Meno, author of The Great Perhaps
"The Nostalgia Echo is ridiculously witty in its observations of the absurdities
of pop culture. But more importantly, Mickey Hess has created the most inventive
narration technique I've ever witnessed."
