Date: August 27, 2008, 8:30pm
Location: Englert Theatre

The University of Iowa Lecture Committee Presents: Chuck Klosterman, author of Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto and Killing Yourself to Live: 85% of a True Story.

More than anyone else in his generation, Chuck Klosterman captures what it feels like to live in'and express ourselves through'our Pop-obsessed, media-saturated culture. One of the most talked about writers today, he shows us why Pop is a conversation anyone can join in on, and why it's worth talking about in the first place.

"Writing about pop culture doesn't get any better than this, or any funnier." That's Stephen King talking about Chuck Klosterman's brilliant debut, Fargo Rock City: A Heavy Metal Odyssey in Rural North Dakota. Though ostensibly about Heavy Metal, the books uses the genre as a framework to discuss larger topics, such as the effects of popular music on shaping a young person's identity. This strategy'to discuss culture at large and reveal greater truths by focusing on seemingly insignificant, often discounted subject matter'has made Klosterman one of the corners of the Pop culture universe and, with deceptively simple and often hilarious writing, he shows us how our cultural choices'the songs we love, the movies we pay to see, the television we can't stop watching'say about us, as individuals and as society. The Onion calls Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs, a New York Times bestseller, 'one of the brightest pieces of pop analysis to appear this century'. Klosterman has written two hardcover and paperback lists. In Killing Yourself to Live, he takes a road trip across America, in the spirit of Hunter S. Thompson and Jack Kerouac. His latest book, Chuck Klosterman IV: A Decade of Curious People and Dangerous Ideas, is a collection of his best interviews and most infamous magazine columns. He pens a popular column for Esquire, 'Chuck Klosterman's America', and is a regular contributor to ESPN.com. Klosterman lives in New York. His first novel, Downtown Owl, is due in the fall of 2008.

What Does Chuck Talk About? Life Through the Prism of Popular Culture

Chuck Klosterman is not a detached academic who deconstructs pop culture at arm's-length with a deadening sterility. On stage, he is just a regular guy with a probing, ruminative mind whose intellectual curiosity is generous, funny and infectious. In his presentations, Klosterman draws in all corners of our culture universe and shows us how pop culture informs our lives (and how it helps people understand the world), and even how to use one's own personal experiences, as he does, to write about and discuss bigger, more complex issues within culture at large.

'Thank God Chuck lives the life he does and writes the way he writes about it. It's not just autobiography; it's a vital form of truth, and he's the real thing'. 'Douglas Coupland, Author of Generation X

'Klosterman might be headed for Hornby, Eggers, and Sedaris status; Killing Yourself to Live should be his breakout book'. 'Entertainment Weekly (A-), 'Top 25 Books of Summer'

This lecture made possible by Cassandra S. Foens, M.D., F.A.C.R..