I received a copy of this book in exchange for my honest review. Thank you NetGalley!

Raised In Captivity is a truly unique collection of stories. As with any short story collection, there were some good stories, some just okay stories, and some not so great stories. Overall, i really did enjoy this book.

Chuck Klosterman is back and he’s more Klosterman-y than ever in his first collection of short stories, Raised in Captivity! I’m a big fan of Chuck’s but this book was just... fine. There was one really good story called Of Course It Is about a man who’s self-aware enough to know he’s in a dream or a character in a story or in the afterlife but doesn’t seem to care. It was a fun, very compelling and subversive look at the short story format, particularly Twilight Zone-type stories.

That’s not to say I didn’t enjoy the other stories but I noticed that, though there are cool and interesting aspects in some of them, they’re not as well rounded from start to finish – they start slowly or end abruptly just as you’re invested in what’s happening. Execute Again is about an unusual football coach who has his team run one play only all season long but it proves to be mega-successful and then he suddenly retires; afterwards every member in the team becomes hugely successful professionally, though in jobs not sports-related.

Not That Kind of Person is about a woman who wants to kill her husband so she hires the “ultimate assassin” who talks exactly like Chuck Klosterman and presents her with an amusingly effective, if time-consuming, method of assassination. Rhinoceros is about a man reconnecting with an old friend who’s become a digital outlaw who’s found a way of permanently deleting Wikipedia entries. The Secret is about a secret government experiment where scores of people are flipping coins all day repeatedly – apparently tails comes up 51% of the time instead of 50% which means the universe is unravelling! That one had the best ending.

They’re well-written stories though occasionally you can tell Chuck used to be a music critic. In Never Look At Your Phone - where a dad playing with his kid in the park is asked by the other mothers there, as he’s the only man in the park, to tell a weirdo in a bright orange jumpsuit sat on a nearby bench eating fruit and talking to the kids to leave – the weirdo is described as “unshaven and a bit slovenly, but not to the level of Aqualung.” It’s not the simile most would make!

Toxic Actuality is a wry look at the current state of hyper-PC college campuses; Blizzard of Summer is about a band whose latest innocuous song has become a surprising hit with white supremacists; Slang of Ages is about some producers commissioning ideas for a TV show/podcast; the Dave Eggers-esque titled To Live in the Hearts of Those We Leave Behind Is Not to Die, Except That It Actually Is is about a dying CIA agent spilling the beans on state secrets.

I won’t go through them all but there’s a bunch of imaginative stories here I liked with lots of great dialogue and funny moments and ideas. That said, there’s about as many I haven’t mentioned that were dull, unimpressive and instantly forgettable! Obviously your mileage may vary – you may love some of the ones I didn’t mention and hate the ones I liked – but I think Kloster-fans, as well as fans of short fiction, will find enough here to enjoy.

I received an advance for reader’s copy in exchange for an honest review
(I.e. I did this to myself)

Nobody:

No one at all:

Not a damn soul:

Chuck Klosterman: Raised in Captivity

Thanks to the publisher and NetGalley, I received an advanced copy of this book in exchange for my honest review.

I've been a Chuck Klosterman fan for many years now, and I love seeing how his writing style has developed and changed over time. This is pretty different from some of the earlier work you may be familiar with, like Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto or Killing Yourself to Live: 85% of a True Story. All great, but definitely different.

This was a book of short stories. There seems to be some conflicting information out there about whether this book is fiction or nonfiction, but you guys... it's fiction. Realistic fiction, and apparently the stories are all about trying to make sense of our crazy reality. With fiction.

Putting together a concise review of this sprawling work is challenging. Some of the short stories I absolutely loved, and were so creative and thoughtful. Five stars! But with others, I had already lost the point by the time I moved on to the next story. Fewer stars.

For me, the best stories were the ones that were very contained. One particular moment in time, or one particular conversation that was in some way revealing or life changing. Like the one about the guy who saw a whale get hit by lighting, and in a moment his entire outlook on life changed. Or the one about the grandpa who is dying and trying to confess the conspiracies he was involved with before he passes away. Or yes, even the conversation between airline passengers about the puma in the bathroom.

Chuck Klosterman is famous for his cultural criticism, and you can see that theme running throughout these stories. It's just cultural criticism in a very different, more abstract manner than we're used to.

Overall, the book was good, and I enjoyed it. Just inconsistent. I might recommend others read it one story at a time, and put it down between stories, instead of flying through them one after another. There's a lot here to digest, and I probably missing some of that by reading this so quickly. Another great addition to the Klosterman catalog.

In his first collection of short stories, Klosterman takes the genre by its word and offers us 34 (!) really short texts, most of them build around one single idea or event that he explores with a narrative twist. Due to this narrative concept, there is not much development and we also don't encounter elaborate poetic concepts, but the reader can always find something original and clever in those vignettes. A panther in an airplane bathroom, a medical procedure that transfers the pain of giving birth to the father, a secret government facility in which people and machines are flipping coins all day - Klosterman has come up with some really weird scenarios, and I am always here for writers with strange ideas.

Frankly, I did expect to love Klosterman, because I guess I am the target demographic here: This is a Minnesota-born, pop culture savvy writer of German descent who made a documentary about James Murphy entitled "Shut Up and Play the Hits" - now that should by my kind of author. But while I liked reading this collection, it didn't really grab me and left me a little detached and cold. I'm surprised that Klosterman generally evokes such strong emotions among reviewers - I found his writing to be aggressively meeeeeh.

"Raised in Captivity" certainly is a smart and playful read, but the stories lack urgency and poetic depth - then again, I am pretty sure Klosterman is not here to throw a po-mo extravaganza, and that he wants his texts to be cool and catchy like a pop tune, which is exactly what these stories are.

Few writers today have been working the cultural criticism beat as long and as successfully as Chuck Klosterman. To many, his is THE voice when it comes to pop analysis and contextualization. But while his latest book might explore some of those same ideas, it does so through a different literary lens.

“Raised in Captivity: Fictional Nonfiction” offers the same sort of quick-hit cleverness that permeates Klosterman’s nonfiction, but via a delivery medium of short fiction. Flash fiction, really – none of the 34 pieces that make up this collection is more than a handful of pages and some are considerably shorter.

The book’s subtitle is an accurate one – the tales contained within are brief, fictionalized explorations of the same ideas and hypotheticals that feature prominently in Klosterman’s nonfiction work. They are strange and offbeat, small and skewed glimpses of the zeitgeist through weird-colored glasses – think “Twilight Zone” or “Black Mirror,” only in a much bigger hurry. And while they vary in length, style and tone, all of them ring loudly with the author’s distinctive voice.

I think the best bet is to stroll through a handful of personal highlights, although the reality is that with this book – even more so than most short fiction collections – your mileage will definitely vary.

The collection’s titular story leads things off. An unnamed man is sitting in first class on a plane, an experience he is more or less enjoying until he goes to the restroom and discovers a puma. He’s left to confront the meaning of this unlikely event. It’s a perfect kickoff to the proceedings, the sort of bizarre “what if?” scenario in which Klosterman loves to dabble.

“Execute Action” is a sports story – or at least sports-adjacent. It’s a man telling a bizarre tale of his high school football team and the non-coach coach who used philosophy and metaphysics to build an entire offense around a single strange play. When properly executed, it would gain precisely 2.7 yards – and so it was the only play the team ran. Throw in some contextual hints toward exceptionalism and you’ve got another weird winner.

One of my absolute favorites of the bunch is “The Secret,” in which a man is recruited into a shadowy government organization that is devoted solely to investigating a shift in the laws of probability – coin flips aren’t 50/50 propositions anymore and no one knows why, but the fate of the universe as we know it may rest on finding out.

“Blizzard of Summer” sees an obscure band find unexpected success when one of their tracks inexplicably becomes wildly popular in white supremacist circles. In “Tricks Aren’t Illusions,” two friends and former magicians come together again when one is in trouble that he’s not willing to discuss. “Trial and Error” follows a woman as she tries to decide whether or not to take drastic action to turn her life around.

In “What About the Children,” a trio of siblings invest their time and efforts into realizing the dream of the younger brother to become a cult leader. “Not That Kind of Person” features a woman looking to have her husband killed but is appalled by the assassin’s proposed method.

There’s the guy who needs a lawyer to fight an assault charge that stems from him being just a little bit rabid. There’s a look at potential new methods for recruiting and grooming TV talking heads. There’s an alternate history about a never-was college basketball dynasty out of MIT. There are men and women dealing with deep fakes and fake wokeness.

Pure Klosterman, all of it.

While in some ways these stories are all over the map, there are certain qualities shared by every offering in “Raised in Captivity.” Each of them is shot through with cleverness and an element of the absurd, capturing the unique inquisitiveness that is a Klosterman hallmark. There’s an ironic detachment throughout the collection, a sense of remove that comes through even when – perhaps ESPECIALLY when – a narrative is unfolding in the first person.

That said, in a collection this size, there’s bound to be some degree of variance in quality. And the truth is that not all of these stories are home runs; some suffer due to Klosterman’s tendency toward abrupt endings, others never quite get sufficient room for their ideas to flower. But even the relative misfires are entertaining despite whatever flaws they might have. He’s throwing everything at the wall to see what sticks, a kitchen sink approach that is enjoyable even when less successful.

“Raised in Captivity” is a fun, fast-moving collection of quick hits. No one looks at the world quite like Chuck Klosterman does; for him to turn that vision in a slightly different direction is a welcome change. Shining that perspective through the prism of fiction makes for a grand and strange good time. There’s wisdom and a surprising amount of pathos as well.

As always, Klosterman keeps it weird – and we wouldn’t have it any other way.

Chuck Klosterman is an interesting and creative guy. As a writer of both long-form fiction (<i>Downtown Owl</i>, <i>The Visible Man</i>) and non-fictional essays (<i>Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs</i>, <i>Eating the Dinosaur</i>, <i>But What If We’re Wrong?</i>), he has proven to be a consistently insightful and out-of-the-box thinker about our modern popular culture. Which begs the question, where exactly does <i> Raised in Captivity</i> fit into his overall catalog of work? Having just finished reading it, I am honestly not really sure.

Subtitled “fictional nonfiction,” the book comprises an assortment of about three dozen short pieces that capture made-up situations that seem as if they could have happened, in the same sense that some of the classic episodes from the television series <i>The Twilight Zone</i> could have possibly been true. Each brief story reads like a lightly fleshed-out narrative around a provocative central idea, such as “What if something in the world shifted so that coin flips no longer had 50-50 outcomes?,” or “What happens when political correctness on college campuses reaches the point where professors are responsible for what students think they heard?,” or “What if someone flying in first class for the first time goes to the restroom and finds a live puma sitting on the toilet?” (By the way, that last notion is the title story for the volume.)

So, it would be fair to think about <i>Raised in Captivity</i> as short stories that explore concepts that would not otherwise fit into Klosterman’s longer non-fictional essays. That is a reasonable goal and one that potentially expands the author’s palette in an intriguing way. The problem I had, however, is that none of the stories were developed in a sufficient way to make them compelling as stand-alone contributions; in fact, it might be better to call them “vignettes” rather than “stories” in the same sense as Alice Munro’s angsty character studies or the wild, off-center fiction of George Saunders. Consequently, although I liked about half of these stories for their humor and viewpoint, I did not find the overall collection to be a wholly successful effort that I can recommend without reservation.

Well....add another Klosterman book on my "oh god, he is the best' shelf. Right next to all his other books.

It's weird. It's funny (I legitimately LOL'd a few times.) It's smart.

It's pure Chuck Klosterman.

Thanks to NetGalley, the publisher and Chuck Klosterman for the opportunity to read and review this book.

Strange, quirky, laugh out loud funny, and straight-up bananas are the words I would use to describe Raised in Captivity. Klosterman does a great job of keeping this book interesting and bizarre, but not to the point that you want to quit reading. It's filled with one-off stories told in a unique manner. One story in particular, with a man who is sitting in a park watching children play, is especially telling.

Overall, I would highly recommend this book.

When I learned I was approved to read Chuck Klosterman's book, I devoured it quickly. I have been reading Klosterman's work for years now and always find something new in his observations. I have enjoyed many of his nonfiction titles. What Raised in Captivity offers is the author's wit and observation, wrapped in a fictional confection.

The result is as amusing, witty, and thought-provoking as any book I have read by this author. Each chapter works as its own relatively brief vignette. It's entertaining, whether the reader encounters an airplane surprise in the title work or eavedrops on a conversation between friends about changing times in a later chapter.

So worth the read. I recommend this book, along with Klosterman's other titles.

This book is unlike any other book I’ve read, it’s truly remarkable. The author describes it as fictional nonfiction; it’s essentially a book of hilariously well-written, kind of weird short stories that are so smart they’ll make you feel stupid.
I enjoyed reading this book. It’s light hearted enough not to keep you awake at night but every story finishes in a way that’s almost a cliff hanger or just has no ending whatsoever. If you’re like me, you’ll sit there and think about it for half an hour, deciding all the possible outcomes or endings that could have been. But the book did make me laugh out loud many times and made me go “hmm” many others.

Klosterman pulls from current events often in these stories and they’re just long enough to pull the reader in and then BAM, it ends. If you’re someone who needs closure, you may not like it. But I would recommend this to anyone who wants a lighthearted, easy-to-read summer vacation book.

Chuck has wowed me in the past with Downtown Owl, and Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs. This book did the same. His ability to write such a tight short story is amazing. Whether the story talks about JFK knowing he would be killed, or someone building a dinosaur in their shed, it was tight, concise, and well-written. Chuck has plenty of music mentions in his stories, and lots of Minnesota mentions. I would definitely recommend this to anyone who enjoys little stories with substance.

A very interesting collection of short stories. Each story rang a bell of recognition with me, with some being more gripping/satisfying than others. My initial curiosity with the term "fictional nonfiction" compelled me to request a copy of this book and I'm glad I did. I'll be interested to see where we place this in my library's catalog, as these stories are clearly works of fiction. However, so many of them have there feet firmly planted in current events/laughable human follies. Sometimes (at least for me) short story collections don't read quickly, although one would think they would. This one was a breeze, with each story being long enough to satisfy the reader, but short enough to be able to quickly move to the next one, if the current story doesn't grab you. Good stuff again from Mr. Klosterman. Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for giving me the chance to read and review. All the best.

This book was exactly what I expected from Chuck Klosterman: weird and wonderful. Short stories that are completely immersive and smart! Perfectly entertaining and wonderful as always!

These very short stories range from mildly amusing to mildly annoying. They felt like writing exercises mainly without a real point. Some felt like jokes that were over-explained, and others were thoughts that should have remained fleeting.

This collection of short stories is incredibly clever, and hilariously ridiculous. “fiction non-fiction” is the perfect description. I’ve read out aloud some of these stories to friends and family, and telling others about it gets funnier every time.
Honestly I’d prescribe this as part of everyone’s self care routine- especially the story of the man wondering if his life is heaven, hell or purgatory!