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"This book is so funny and so true. Charles Finch unpacks a year of plague, fear, shameless venality, and dizzying stupidity with an irrepressible wit and surgically precise cultural observations. I didn't know how badly I needed exactly this. Maybe you do too?" —Joe Hill, author of Heart-Shaped Box
In March 2020, at the request of the Los Angeles Times, Charles Finch became a reluctant diarist: As California sheltered in place, he began to write daily notes about the odd ambient changes in his own life and in the lives around him. The result is What Just Happened.
In a warm, candid, welcoming voice, and in the tradition of Woolf and Orwell, Finch brings us into his own world: taking long evening walks near his home in L.A., listening to music, and keeping virtual connections with friends across the country as they each experience the crisis. And drawing on his remarkable acuity as a cultural critic, he chronicles one endless year with delightful commentary on current events, and the things that distract him from current events: Murakami’s novels, reality television, the Beatles.
What Just Happened is a work of empathy and insight, at once of-the-moment and timeless—a gift from one of our culture's most original thinkers.
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Creators
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Publisher
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Release date
November 9, 2021 -
Formats
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OverDrive Listen audiobook
- ISBN: 9780593454862
- File size: 226791 KB
- Duration: 07:52:28
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Languages
- English
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Reviews
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November 8, 2021
“Life simple: Don’t go anywhere and be afraid,” writes novelist and critic Finch (The Inheritance) in this perceptive chronicle of his experience of the Covid-19 pandemic. After he was commissioned in March 2020 by the Los Angeles Times to document his observations during lockdown, Finch logged the grief, hope, and desperation he encountered day by day as the pandemic took hold. From the start, his takes are remarkably prescient: “However serious this ends up, the virus is being politicized,” he notes on March 11. Readers will feel an intimate familiarity with the bewilderment that imbues his early observations, as he laments not being able to make certain foods because of scarcity issues (“Will we see canned peas again?” he half-jokingly asks) while simultaneously dealing with shock and frustration at the Trump administration’s resistance to “admit the full danger of the virus.” His writing inevitably dips into cynicism as the death toll rises, but plenty of humorous moments break through, including his hilarious roasts of Trump’s officials, such as “Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo (whom I think we have to take as nature’s last word on how closely a human can resemble a toad).” Even at its darkest, this serves as a moving testament to the resilience of humanity. Agent: Elisabeth Weed, the Book Group.
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