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The Nostalgia Echo
"THE NOSTALGIA ECHO is the best book you will read this year, or any 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
The wit and inventiveness of Mickey Hess’s world was what first pulled me in, but ultimately it’s the characters, the depth of their struggles, that makes The Nostalgia Echo remarkable. Hess shines a new light on age old questions — Who are we? How can we find what we’re looking for? — and produces a novel so stunningly engrossing, I didn’t want it to end.
—Laura van den Berg, author of What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us
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.
—Joey Goebel, author of Commonwealth
—Joe Meno
The wit and inventiveness of Mickey Hess’s world was what first pulled me in, but ultimately it’s the characters, the depth of their struggles, that makes The Nostalgia Echo remarkable. Hess shines a new light on age old questions — Who are we? How can we find what we’re looking for? — and produces a novel so stunningly engrossing, I didn’t want it to end.
—Laura van den Berg, author of What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us
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.
—Joey Goebel, author of Commonwealth
331 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 1, 2011
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
October 19, 2012
The Nostalgia Echo by Mickey Hess, the first novel from C&R Press, is a book with many layers. It follows the storyline of a professional narrator named Gene in search of his birth mother, armed only with a Polaroid photograph of her at a book signing for Doctor Everett Barnes, a nostalgia expert who is at the center of the novel and its subplots.
The Nostalgia Echo is reminiscent of Paul Auster’s City of Glass in that the quest is not the actual quest, but rather the exploration of what is real and what is not from the perspective of an unreliable narrator: “I like to pretend I’m an objective reporter of whatever story I’m telling, but when I get bored and cranky I tend to make things up.” More: http://writeliving.wordpress.com/2012...
The Nostalgia Echo is reminiscent of Paul Auster’s City of Glass in that the quest is not the actual quest, but rather the exploration of what is real and what is not from the perspective of an unreliable narrator: “I like to pretend I’m an objective reporter of whatever story I’m telling, but when I get bored and cranky I tend to make things up.” More: http://writeliving.wordpress.com/2012...
September 13, 2013
It was an extremely s-l-o-w start. Extremely wordy, and not really covering too much, other then stroking the narrator's ego. Somewhere in the second half of the book, it started to get interesting, the story ended. Goodreads did enable me to read this one.
January 20, 2012
I really liked this hyperbolic look at a world obsessed with a now-happening look past. Pure satire in Twainian way.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews