Board

by Brad Listi, Justin Benton

Board is a groundbreaking work of literary collage derived entirely from comment boards at The Nervous Breakdown, an online culture magazine and literary community founded in 2006. It is a unique artifact of the Internet Age and the digital revolution in publishing. It is a cacophony of voices. It is what your computer screen sounds like, only better. It is strangely moving. And painfully honest. And shockingly funny and mean. It is all of these things. And it is essential reading for anyone who spends too much time sitting slack-jawed in front of a computer screen.

"Expertly interweaving its leitmotifs—technology, dreams, sex food, 'identity politics,' death—Board is a book in conversation with itself about a culture at war with itself. A sharp, funny, and unexpectedly moving take on contemporary America in the digital age." —David Shields, author of Reality Hunger and How Literature Saved My Life

"A must-read…exhilarating, hypnotic, hilarious, and fun." —Jeff Ragsdale, author of Jeff, One Lonely Guy

"Fascinating, funny, full of enthusiasm and great loneliness…a portrait of the web in its own words." —Ben Loory, author of Stories for Nighttime and Some for the Day

"Sweet." —Megan Boyle, author of selected unpublished blog posts of a mexican panda express employee

Genres: Fiction

246 pages, Kindle Edition

First published November 9, 2012

About the author

Brad Listi is the author of the novel Be Brief and Tell Them Everything (Ig Publishing / May 2022). His other books include the novel Attention. Deficit. Disorder., an LA Times bestseller, and Board, a work of nonfiction collage, co-authored with Justin Benton. He is the founding editor of The Nervous Breakdown, an online literary magazine, and in 2011 he launched the Otherppl podcast, which features in-depth interviews with today's leading writers. He lives in Los Angeles.

Reviews

[Natalie · Rating 3 out of 5]

I don't really know what to say about Board. It was an experiment. A "literary collage" created by pulling together message board posts from The Nervous Breakdown. I sometimes do get caught up in reading boards--for example, I'll go to read an article at Salon.com or someplace like that and then get pulled in by both the smart thoughts and the idiotry expressed in the comments section. Board is a lot like that. I got pulled in, and I kept reading, but I was annoyed by a lot of it, and don't really know what I gained from it in the end. (Yes, I know, we don't always have to gain something by reading a book, but we should at least be entertained, right?) Some of the posters try to be really insightful, but to me come across as being very aware of being read. There is a falseness to this book that is inherent to message boards--this "Here's my opinion, though you don't care, and I don't care what you think", but of course the poster does care, or they wouldn't have posted in the first place. It's also a strange thing to me, reading all these board posts without actually knowing what they're commenting on in the first place (the original stories from TNB aren't included). I don't know. I see this as something contributors to TNB would be really into, because they're part of it, but I don't know that I can really recommend it to anyone else, unless you are just looking to see how a project book comes together. I like a good project, but for me the book has to eventually push past that, and I'm not sure this one does.

To hear a full discussion on Board, as well as Scott McClananhan's Crapalachia, tune in to the next episode of SummerBooks at www.summerbooks.podbean.com.

[Heather]

Lives up to title. Short, revealing, heartbreaking roman a cle by my brilliant friend Brad. Thumbs up.

[Aaron Dietz · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is a surprisingly coherent book. One can predict it would be clever and funny and also poignant at times, as that's the style of communication that regularly happens on the comment boards of TheNervousBreakdown.com, but stringing comments from posts on such varied topics together into a coherent narrative of this quality impressed me.
There's also an added meta level to this--the comments originally were written about the post from the website but now they're in this book...so sometimes there's a duality at work. The comments are speaking about something else originally but now they also speak to something even more up to date. Momentary.
It's a joy.