Raised in Captivity: Fictional Nonfiction

by Chuck Klosterman (Narrator), James Urbaniak (Narrator), Bill Wise (Narrator)

Microdoses of the straight dope, stories so true they had to be wrapped in fiction for our own protection, from the best-selling author of But What if We're Wrong?

A man flying first class discovers a puma in the lavatory. A new coach of a small-town Oklahoma high school football team installs an offense comprised of only one, very special, play. Four old friends are joined at their local bar by a stranger who seems to know everything about them. A man explains to the police why he told the employee of his local bodega that his colleague looked like the lead singer of Depeche Mode, a statement that may or may not have led in some way to a violent crime. A college professor discusses with his friend his difficulties with the new generation of students. An obscure power pop band wrestles with its new-found fame when its song "Blizzard of Summer" becomes an anthem for white supremacists. A couple considers getting a medical procedure that will transfer the pain of childbirth from the woman to her husband. A woman interviews a hit man about killing her husband but is shocked by the method he proposes. A man is recruited to join a secret government research team investigating why coin flips are no longer exactly 50/50. A man sees a whale struck by lightning, and knows that everything about his life has to change. A lawyer grapples with the unintended side effects of a veterinarian's rabies vaccination.

Fair warning: Raised in Captivity does not slot into a smooth preexisting groove. If Saul Steinberg and Italo Calvino had adopted a child from a Romanian orphanage and raised him on Gary Larsen and Thomas Bernhard, he would still be nothing like Chuck Klosterman. They might be good company, though. Funny, wise and weird in equal measure, Raised in Captivity bids fair to be one of the most original and exciting story collections in recent memory, a fever graph of our deepest unvoiced hopes, fears and preoccupations. Ceaselessly inventive, hostile to corniness in all its forms, and mean only to the things that really deserve it, it marks a cosmic leap forward for one of our most consistently interesting writers.

Genres: Fiction, Short Stories, Humor, Audiobook, Contemporary, Essays, Anthologies

Audible Audio

First published July 16, 2019

About the author

Charles John Klosterman is an American author and essayist whose work focuses on American popular culture. He has been a columnist for Esquire and ESPN.com and wrote "The Ethicist" column for The New York Times Magazine. Klosterman is the author of twelve books, including two novels and the essay collection Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto. He was awarded the ASCAP Deems Taylor award for music criticism in 2002.

Reviews

[Sam Quixote · Rating 3 out of 5]

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.

[Maxwell · Rating 2 out of 5]

[2.5 stars]

Weird. Some good weird, some just...weird weird? My biggest issue was most of them just felt underdeveloped. I imagine he had a bunch of shower thoughts and went, "Those would make great stories!" Maybe he drafted a few of them, then 'polished' them off later. Then that was it. I wanted them to go further, to say something—instead the stories felt like someone telling you a facsimile of their iPhone notes in 'fictional' form and ending with, "What'd ya think about that, huh?"

[Tim · Rating 3 out of 5]

Enjoyable excerpts of daily life with some alternative views from author Klosterman. 7 of 10 stars

[Meike · Rating 3 out of 5]

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 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.

[Peter Colclasure · Rating 2 out of 5]

I love Chuck Klosterman. His essays about music and pop culture, primarily, but I also enjoyed his first two novels. This is his first book that I didn't care for. It's advertised as fictional nonfiction, which means it's a collection of short stories that explore different ideas about reality. The problem is that they don't quite work as stories, and they don't hold interest as ideas.

As I wrote elsewhere, Stephen King is the master of premise, even if he can't always wrap that premise up in a bow and bring it to a tidy conclusion. The stories here suffer from the Stephen King problem writ micro. Each one has an interesting premise, but it doesn't get developed or give the reader a reason to care. There are no fully developed characters, and stories are more scenarios than stories. It would have been better if Klosterman had just written, "What if there was a secret government lab where they had people flip coins and realized that tails was coming up 51% of the time rather than 50% of the time?" Rather than write a story about it.

Here are my thoughts:

Raised In Captivity
I thought this story was a bit whimsical and trite. A man finds a puma in the bathroom on an airplane. Rather than inform the stewardess, he gets into an existential conversation with the man seated next to him about what is real and how we can know.

Execute Again
Kind of liked this story about a football coach who has his team execute a single play over and over again. I thought it was funny. Though I wasn’t clear on how the defense would work. When you score, you have to kick off to the other team.

Toxic Actuality
Topical. Asks what are we to make of hyper-PC campus culture, and the answer is to shrug, that’s just the way things are.

How Can This Be The Place?
The most plausible story so far. Funny. “No one deserves anything, everything is negotiable, and I need to take a shower.”

The Truth About Food
Pseudo-science brain candy.

Every Day Just Comes and Goes
A man refuses to accept the inevitability of time-travel.

Blizzard of Summer
Intriguing premise. Sorta funny. Doesn’t go anywhere or achieve resolution.

Of Course It Is
Sounds like a nice afterlife. I guess heaven or hell depends on your perspective.

Skin
Oh man, this was a missed opportunity. The twist should have been that the girlfriend had been to the restaurant before, with a man with whom she was having an affair, and eaten the duck previously, and that’s why she was crying.

The Perfect Kind Of Friend
This is a metaphor for something, but I’m not sure what.

Cat Person
Silly in a boring way.

Experience Music Project
Not about the museum in Seattle

Pain Is A Concept By Which We Measure Our God
The most interesting aspects of this technology were only explored as an aside, in the last few paragraphs.

Not That Kind Of Person
Totally implausible. Darkly funny.

Rhinoceros
Weird.

The Enemy Within
This story will be painfully dated in 10 years.

The Secret
The universe is unraveling and coin flips are coming up tails 55 percent of the time and a secret government lab is trying to figure it out. This one was kind of fun to ponder.

Trial And Error
Maybe a metaphor for belief in God or something?

A Trick Is Not An Illusion
Ties into a previous Klosterman theme, what’s more impressive an amazing magic trick that is just an illusion, or a boring magic trick that is actually magic?

Flue
A whale gets struck by lightning.

If Something Is Free The Product Is You
I liked this story. Money isn’t everything. But everything is money.

Never Look At Your Phone
I don’t get why the guy didn’t want to look at his phone.

Reality Apathy
Sounds plausible.

Reasonable Apprehension
Completely absurd.

Just Asking Questions
I wished the characters in these stories talked like real people.

To Live In The Hearts Of Those We Leave Behind
More weird questions without answers.

Tell Don’t Show
For a guy who uses the word specific a lot, some of these stories are a bit vague.

Slang of Ages
Seems like a framing device used to cram a few half-baked ideas into one story.

Slow Pop
Again, too short and undeveloped to care about anyone.

I Get It Now
I don’t get it.

The Power of Other People
In Klosterman’s previous book, I Wear The Black Hat, he argued that the bad guy in the room is the one who knows the most but cares the least. Somehow this story has something to do with that.

[Benoit Lelièvre · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you've ever wondered what Chuck Klosterman thinks about social media, gender politics or or any other hot button topic he's been cleverly avoiding for all these years, it's all in this bad boy.

The short stories of Raised in Captivity are a lot more dense and will make you work harder than Klosterman's essays. It's perhaps the closest he's ever been to David Foster Wallace. But nonetheless, his mind is a more democratic place than Wallace's and even if he employs didactic allegories (which I usually hate), the purpose of every story eventually reveals itself without having you clawing your head open for answers.

Raised in Captivity is like a coded discussion between initiates. Don't expect Klosterman to take position on any of your favorite battle-axe issues without any of his trademark nuance and detachment. But this book answers questions fans like me have been asking themselves for years now. It's an incredible act of generosity.

[Ryan · Rating 4 out of 5]

I began Raised in Captivity wondering why Chuck Klosterman wrote a short story collection and found myself wondering why short fiction exists at all. After all, who really reads short stories anymore? So I came up with some pretentious theories about why people still write short fiction, putting aside the obvious answer that sometimes people just want to write short stories.

Here they are. First, writers use short stories as training to become novelists. In short fiction, writers practice paragraphing, character development, plotting, etc. without investing very much time. I imagine that novels are more lucrative (relative to short fiction), but they take more time and are a bigger risk to a developing writer. Second, established authors publish short stories when they have a backlog of ideas that can’t be developed into novels. Due to their established audience they can still turn those stories into a marketable product. Third, short fiction is a vehicle for expressing emotions and ideas in a way that’s less time consuming than novels but not quite as free/ demanding as poetry. Fourth, short fiction works well for clever thought experiments, not so different from Ted Chiang’s stories. Because Ted Chiang’s stories are pretty cool, people want to emulate him and we’ll soon see many writers of non-fiction trying their hand at short stories.

Which of these theories explains Klosterman’s Raised in Captivity? Maybe it's worth summarizing the premise of the opening story. The hero finds a puma (a mountain lion) in the first class washroom. The story is a vehicle for speculating about how a puma came to be on an airplane. No ultimate explanation is given because the story is prefers speculation to explanation.

The first theory, training, doesn’t apply. Klosterman has already written two novels, Downtown Owl and Visible Man. The established author with an unusable backlog theory applies. These stories feel like they’ve been practiced at dinner parties and they (remember the puma) wouldn’t work as novels or even as essays. The third theory, that short fiction is a vehicle for expressing emotions, applies. Several of the stories are about longterm relationships and existential crises. (I especially enjoyed one line about a woman who, although she claims to wish her husband shared his feelings more, realizes that she finds her husband annoying when he shares his feelings more.) Unlike the puma stories, which reveal wit, these existential stories capture the enduring disillusion felt by Gen Xers (“insane” appears a few times to describe ordinary but somewhat confounding events). As for theory No. 4, although I don’t know that Klosterman wants to be like Ted Chiang, he does enjoy thought experiments. The “fictional non-fiction” collated here recalls the thought experiments Klosterman includes in many of his essays but they are presented without argumentative structures.

Maybe there is another option: expectations of the form offer a shield unavailable to essayists. Although I’m not sure how I’d prove this, I suspect there’s less expectation of writers to explain the urge to write fiction. Essays and argument, however, almost always invite interrogation into motive. A few stories here tentatively tease progressives, but I doubt Klosterman wants his thoughts on the culture wars to go viral--or that he wants people to begin deconstructing any stance he has about progressives. If he were to write an essay, rather than a short story, he’d have to put more cards on the table and more money in the pot. The form offers a sort of distance (e.g. "I just thought that line would be funny"), or plausible deniability (e.g. "the character thinks progressives can be pretentious, not me"), that must be attractive. Also, aren’t essays about midlife crises a sort of cliche naval gazing? I wonder if those feelings seem less indulgent if they’re dressed up as short stories.

Regardless, Raised in Captivity is nearly as fun as Klosterman’s essays, these stories are very short, and it’s not every day one finds a good excuse to read short fiction in 2019. Recommended.

[Peter Derk · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of my favorite things about Chuck Klosterman is that when he has a new book come out, he usually appears on a handful of podcasts.

Here's a quick back and forth, paraphrased, from one of those interviews:

Chuck: I was trying to write a set of stories that were exactly 1000 words apiece.

Interviewer: That sounds like a very Chuck Klosterman thing to do.

Chuck: Well, I am Chuck Klosterman.

This book seems like a departure, but it's not. Imagine the hypothetical questions from Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs, but narrative-ized. A little more world is built around them, and you get a better sense of the strangeness of the scenarios. But that's what the stories are more like: scenarios. They aren't traditional short stories where some stuff happens and people feel ways about that stuff (sidebar: I love short stories, but I think I just wrote the most apt description of them ever). They start as a premise, explore the premise a bit, and then usually leave things hanging. Sometimes in service of exploring a deeper question, sometimes not. Sometimes they're a little Twilight-Zone-y with a twist, and sometimes not.

In the same interview, Klosterman said, no bullshit, this was the most fun he had writing a book since the first one, and I believe it. Because it's some of the most fun I've had reading him.

[Robert · Rating 3 out of 5]

One of the rare ones I feel I might have enjoyed more as a traditional read as opposed to an audioread, in spite of the plethora of impressive guest narrators assisting Chuck.

The main issue is that the stories are all fairly short and frequently end quite abruptly. Oftentimes I was left wondering, was there a twist? Did it just end? And by the time my hands were free to "rewind" and try and suss it our I was already halfway through the next one and couldn't be bothered. Had I been reading in the traditional sense it would have been obvious the story was about to end and, accustomed to the conventions of the short story form as I am, I would have started paying closer attention!


I was never quite so visibly confused as this person but still

All that said there were some amusing stories but it is also incredible how dated the mid- to late-2010s references feel now in 2025 after the world has taken several turns to the absurd and cruel beyond even what the author could imagine then.

[JennaOtterReads · Rating 3 out of 5]

Book Title: Raised in Captivity: Fictional Nonfiction
Standalone or Series: Standalone
Author: Chuck Klosterman
Genre(s): Fictional Nonfiction, Short Story, Contemporary
Recommended Age Rating: 13+
Reasons Why: Sex and porn (multiple mentions), drugs and alcohol (multiple mentions), language
Recommended for Fans of: Short stories and other Chuck Klosterman books
Overall Rating: B-
Brief Summary: This book is told through many short stories ranging from a panther in the airplane bathroom, to a football coach who has his players repeat the same play for an entire season then mysteriously vanishes, and even to a lab where people flip coins and heads and tails isn't a 50/50 spit but 51/49.

It was weird, it was twisted, it was funny.

Each story was only ~4 pages long, so it really only had enough time to introduce a concept before it ended. There was almost no character development as each story was a different character, but the stories themselves were really interesting. There was even one in second person POV!

Overall, it was a strange experience. On balance, I liked it more than I disliked it.

[Ken · Rating 5 out of 5]

After much thought, I feel comfortable in declaring that Klosterman is the author I most enjoy reading. He’s not my favorite writer, nor is he the best I routinely read.

This will probably change, but it will also change back the next time Chuck releases a book.

I own all of his books, and have never reread one of them. I am never tempted to do so. I feel they are perfectly consumed with one through and thoughtful reading.

I know I have written this before, but I don’t know if I like what he writes because we think a like, or if I like what he writes because he himself has framed the way I think. It’s probably a bit of both.

[Jillian Doherty · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliantly effortless; if you love Chuck Klosterman - and you should :) you'll love this too!
Fresh, smart, and subjective as the author himself.

I could easily imagine each story continuing, growing, and developing as he naturally does - but I was equally content as well, which felt even better when reflecting on each story.

These rich, thoughtful, and immersive pieces are for fans of his early work, as well as new fans of intelligently witty writing.

Galley borrowed from the publisher.

[Suzana · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5

[Christian · Rating 5 out of 5]

Honestly, I don't understand what some people have against Klosterman. The man is insightful and always manages to convey his thoughts with brevity.

This was honestly one of my favorite short story collections. There wasn't anything in here that I found distasteful or boring, and I ended every entry with something to chew on. Plus, these short stories were SHORT. The pacing felt very brisk as a result. Not only that, but several of these entries got a good laugh out of me.

The more I read from Klosterman, the more I start to compare him to authors like Palahniuk and Murakami. This anthology may not be for everyone, but I found it to be perfect for what it is.

[Jade · Rating 5 out of 5]

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!

[Alan · Rating 3 out of 5]

"We can't discount the taste of dumb people. That's half the audience."
—"Blizzard of Summer," p.59

But I think Chuck's actually writing for the other half...

The subtitle of Raised in Captivity bills Chuck Klosterman's 2019 collection as "fictional nonfiction," an intentionally (I suspect) ambiguous phrase that I initially confused with "creative nonfiction," a more descriptively-named genre whose exponents include (among many others) my Goodreads friend Sarah Einstein. But... a puma shows up in an airplane lavatory, in the very first, eponymous story. Yeah, this book's a lot more fiction than non—.

Raised in Captivity consists of 34 vignettes. Snapshots. They're bite-sized confections, like a (cliché alert) box o'chocolates, but one where now and then you bite into a piece filled with wasabi, or lutefisk. Which is good—most of these conceits would be hard to sustain in any longer format.

My favorite was "Cat Person," whose plot involves the tactical use of Toxoplasma gondii:

"{...}This isn't terrorism. There's no activist aspect. It's not political. This is just a man rubbing cats on people."
—Officer McMullin, p.89

Sometimes Klosterman's characters do seem just a little peevish about their declining privilege—after all, it's so hard to find anything run by cis/het white males these days. But such pique, when present, is subtle, and of course no indication of what Klosterman himself thinks.

And, this being Chuck Klosterman, the irony occasionally reaches sublime levels:

Ruth was the kind of woman who always wished her husband talked about his feelings more than he did. Now it was actually happening, and she was surprised by how annoying it was. Why was this happening tonight? It had been a wonderful weekend, up until now.
—"Fluke," p.204

Many of these stories are SF, or at least science-fictionally adjacent... but as a whole Raised in Captivity is not a book I'd try to sell to a science fiction reader. But if you don't mind a little genre-bending... Chuck Klosterman's collection certainly delivers.

[Alyssa Lizarraga · Rating 4 out of 5]

Somehow both powerfully cerebral and packed with otherworldly whimsy, these thirty-four short stories by Chuck Klosterman strike a menacing balance between what our eyes have seen and what only our invasive thoughts are familiar with. Each of these stories takes place in a world just adjacent to ours, shifted the length of a single mustard seed to the left. It is not necessarily fantasy or science fiction in the traditional sense, but have you ever heard of a physics-derived football play that, when perfected, is impossible to keep from advancing? I hadn’t before I read this book, and Klosterman almost made me believe in it.

There were some stories that legitimately made my jaw drop as I read them. There were some stories that were just…too high concept for me to get enjoyment from (I’m looking at you, story titled “[ ]”). There were some that made me feel disgusted and annoyed and inspired and infinitely small. Klosterman is clearly an author whose imagination has no limits (or, rather, he has not found them yet and is determined to) and needs to microdose bringing his bursts of vivid monochrome to fruition. I would recommend this book to anyone who has a random list of absolutely anything in their Notes app and wants to be inspired to nurture their own absurdity.

[John of Canada · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am going to have to read this several more times, and then my brain will have expanded enough to understand the point and idea of these stories. Some very cleverly oblique sociological references, or is that just my imagination? I was reading a thriller at the time I was in the middle of this, and it really felt as if my perceptions had mysteriously changed. Hmmm. Does anyone out there have Klosterman's phone number?
My favourite bit of dialogue? "We have reason to believe your boyfriend is "Fake Woke."
Klosterman also offers some very good advice that will bring opposing sides together: "Don't marginalize orange cats."

[Andrea · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some interesting story ideas here but the overall listening experience was pretty bland.

[John Lamb · Rating 5 out of 5]

Disclosure: I received an ARC from Penguin House.

Each story in this collection is a brief exploration of something philosophical or thought-provoking. Some examples: A football coach who begins the season with lectures on Kierkegaard; a band is flummoxed when their innocuous power ballad becomes a white supremacist favorite; a new procedure allows pain to be transferred to the husband. You will be reminded of Etgar Keret or maybe even the films of Yorgos Lanthimos, although Kolsterman's distinct critical eye is still dominant. Each story is surreal and weird and wonderful. I highly recommend it, especially if you want to be slightly amused, a little perplexed, and always thinking.

[Samantha Burd · Rating 5 out of 5]

A great collection of short stories that I’d recommend to anyone. Klosterman has a way of putting thoughts into words that I’d never be able to manage myself, and it’s incredibly satisfying to see these thoughts so elegantly dictated on paper in front of me.

Each story drags you into its own little world, and is utterly captivating. My only complaint is the stories are too short... but I guess they’re called short stories for a reason... plus Klosterman’s style. Some stories are better left unfinished/ open ended/ left to the imagination, I suppose.

A great, quick #QuarantineRead.

[Lorri Steinbacher · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you like stories that are quirky and odd but strangely relatable nonetheless, you will find everything you’re looking for. If you’re a Klosterman fan, this is peak Klosterman, you will find everything you’re looking for.

The stories make you laugh out loud and also think, but without all that postmodernism or some other MFA nonsense that you often have to wade through in a lot of short story collections.

Full disclosure: I skipped the sports-ish one.

[Jeff Mauch · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is a so-so at best volume of short stories. I really enjoyed one of Klosterman's earlier books and have since picked up 2-3 others, but have been more and more disappointed with each one. Klosterman can be downright witty and interesting at times, but it seems its fewer and farther in between. I only really found one or two stories here that I even remotely found to be above average. Most were the kind of short stories that should have just been tossed in the garbage. They are incomplete and lacking and I have to assume the author simply had a deadline as part of a multiple book deal as there is no way anyone could be proud of this work and there's no way it would have been published otherwise. Skip this one.

[Robyn Covell · Rating 4 out of 5]

I picked this up because I've really enjoyed his non-fiction work before. I'm so happy I did, as these short stories were compulsively readable and I enjoyed almost all of them. Each one felt like a mini episode of Black Mirror, and my main complaint would be that I would've liked some of them to be longer.

[RJ Siano · Rating 5 out of 5]

All of Klosterman’s short stories are a vibrant mix of surreal, slightly disturbing and undoubtedly hilarious. Each story is exactly long enough to have a deeper meaning or pose an existential question more successfully than some books I’ve read can - but be careful, because all of them can just as easily be missed. This book made me want to start writing again.

[Jim Beatty · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was just telling your brother that his sonic aesthetics latenly promote inclusion, and recognize intersectionality, and that he decterously seized through the institutionalised facade that dictates musicians must play their own instruments and write their own material in order to galvanize relevancy.

[Stetson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Raised in Captivity: Fictional Nonfiction is a fun read wherein Chuck Klosterman unspools a bunch of fictional shorts that touch on his usual preoccupations (e.g. popular culture especially music, the vagaries of memory, the effect of expectations on subjective experience, sociopolitical phenomena, absurd hypotheticals/thought experiments). The seams show a bit in this work, which may turn off some readers. For instance, the meta-fictional moments, patische, and absurdism all read as Klosterman performing impressions of gonzo journalists or postmodernist, hysterical realist, and new sincerest authors (i.e. Pynchon, DFW, Franzen, Thompson, etc) rather than as an attempt to develop his own fictional voice. The stories that work the best are probably those where Klosterman is relying more heavily on his pre-existing essay voice (e.g. self-consciously arch, benignly wry, and authentically curious and reflective), though there are still some pretty funny moment scattered across the work.

Klosterman tries to make some didactic points with his stories, which often come off simultaneously as too clever by half and exhaustingly self-conscious. Klosterman is certainly endowed with an impressive and creative mind, but he would benefit from greater sustained focus on his own ideas and disappearing within the content of his work instead of mostly looming as a ubiquitous presence. However, as always, I am happy to pick up one of his works.

[Mike · Rating 2 out of 5]

I've been hearing a lot about this book lately. Some have said it's a work of quirky genius while others describe it as something more akin to mental flatulence (brain farts). I stand firmly in the middle ground but tilt more towards the latter.

There are 34 short stories in this collection, many of them just a few pages long, none over 10 or 12 pages. I found a few of them really interesting and profound. There were also a few that I found to be almost completely incoherent. The majority of the collection was... well, something to read, I guess.

My first instinct with something like this - a title that has received glowing reviews more often than not but didn't have much of an impression on me - is that I just didn't "get it". That I am too old, clueless, uncool, ignorant, or whatever to understand the nuance of what the author was trying to do. While that may indeed be the case here it seemed that many of the stories were simply a combination of incomplete thought experiments or random paragraphs haphazardly dropped in from space or perhaps various alternate realities. They never made any kind of sense to me.

To be fair, I came in thinking that the designation "fictional nonfiction" meant it was a collection of " too strange to be true but too true to be completely fiction" kind of tales one might find in a collection of Florida Man-type stories. Off-the-wall or oddball characters in wacky predicaments. My expectations were for something a little more tongue-in-cheek. Perhaps with some apocalyptic sci-fi or some such. That it wasn't what I had expected is my fault not the author's.

My recommendation for other readers, considering what a mixed bag this collection proved to be, is to check it out at the library rather than purchase it. You'll probably find something to like in a few of the stories but it's doubtful that for the average reader the purchase price will be comparable to the overall reading enjoyment.

***Thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for providing me with a free digital copy of this title in exchange for an honest review

[Josh · Rating 5 out of 5]

While I usually reserve 5-stars for great works of literature, or whatever, I am giving this one 5-stars because Chuck Klosterman wrote himself out of the biggest question I had, which is how he could break away from the essay collection format without becoming boring.

His books of random essays were never going to top SD&C, even if they were technically better, and his fiction was only good when characters randomly started talking about music.

In this book, he finds a way to assert himself as culture critic within the possibilities of fiction. This allows him to take off the specific shackles which have held his previous work back, which are autobiography, sophistry, and plot.

Each ministory is pretty good.

[Mike Ely · Rating 1 out of 5]

Reading this book was PAINFUL!
Klosterman is one of my favorite writers but I really disliked this book. The short stories are boring, unimaginitive, or just dumb. I'm sure they threw money at Chuck to put out a futuristic fiction book, and Chuck is hoping that one of his Philip K. Dick-like ripoff stories gets picked up and made it to a movie, but seriously - READ Philip K. Dick instead. The only reason that I kept reading and finished the book was that I couldn't believe that Chuck could write 30+ short stories and I wouldn't like any of them. But that's pretty much what happened.
Chuck, please go back to NONFICTION. This attempt at Fictional Nonfiction failed, badly.