Coming off the breakthrough success of Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs and Killing Yourself to Live , bestselling pop culture guru Chuck Klosterman assembles his best work previously unavailable in book form—including the groundbreaking 1996 piece about his chicken McNuggets experiment, his uncensored profile of Britney Spears, and a previously unpublished short story—all recontextualized in Chuck’s unique voice with new intros, outros, segues, and masterful footnotes. Chuck Klosterman IV consists of three parts: Things That Are True—Profiles and trend stories: Britney Spears, Radiohead, Billy Joel, Metallica, Val Kilmer, Bono, Wilco, the White Stripes, Steve Nash, Morrissey, Robert Plant—all with new introductions and footnotes. Things That Might Be True—Opinions and theories on everything from monogamy to pirates to robots to super people to guilt, and (of course) Advancement—all with new hypothetical questions and footnotes. Something That Isn’t True At All—This is old fiction. There’s a new introduction, but no footnotes. Well, there’s a footnote in the introduction, but none in the story. "One of America's top cultural critics." -- Entertainment Weekly "Mr. Klosterman makes good, smart company." -- The New York Times "He's perfect junk food for the soul." -- Los Angeles Times Book Review "The reigning Kasparov of pop culture wits-matching." -- San Francisco Chronicle "Klosterman is like the new Hunter S. Thompson." -- People "Ferociously clever and ferociously self-deprecating." -- Evening Standard (London) "He's killing his artform, in hopes of reviving it." -- The Onion A.V. Club Chuck Klosterman is the bestselling author of ten nonfiction books (including The Nineties ; Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs ; and But What If We’re Wrong? ), two novels ( Downtown Owl and The Visible Man ), and the short story collection Raised in Captivity . He has written for The New York Times , The Washington Post , Esquire , Spin , The Guardian , The Believer , and ESPN. Klosterman served as the Ethicist for The New York Times Magazine and was an original founder of the website Grantland with Bill Simmons. He was raised in rural North Dakota and now lives in Portland, Oregon. "Can I tell you something weird?" he asked. This probably isn't a valid question, because one can never say no to such an inquiry. But this is what he asked me. "Of course," I said in response. "Always." "Okay, well...great. That's great." He collected his thoughts for fourteen seconds. "Something is happening to me," he said. "I keep thinking about something that happened to me a long time ago. Years ago. Like, this thing happened to me in eighth fucking grade. This is a situation I hadn't even thought about for probably ten or fifteen years. But then I saw a documentary that reexamined the Challenger explosion, and this particular event had happened around that same time. And what's disturbing is that -- now -- I find myself thinking about this particular afternoon constantly. I have dreams about it. Every time I get drunk or stoned, I inevitably find myself sitting in a dark room, replaying the sequence of the events in my mind, over and over again. And the details I remember from this 1986 afternoon are unfathomably intense. Nothing is missing and nothing is muddled. And I'm starting to believe -- and this, I suppose, is the weird part -- that maybe this day was the most important day of my entire life, and that everything significant about my personality was created on this one particular afternoon. I'm starting to suspect that this memory is not merely about a certain day of my life; this memory is about the day, if you get my meaning." "I think I do," I said. "Obviously, I'm intrigued." "I thought you would be," he replied. "In fact, that's why I specifically wanted to talk to you about this problem. Because the story itself isn't amazing. It's not like my best friend died on this particular day. It's not like a wolf showed up at my school and mauled a bunch of teachers. It's not a sad story, and it's not even a funny story. It's about a junior-high basketball game." "A junior-high basketball game." "Yes." "The most important day in your life was a junior-high basketball game." "Yes." "And you're realizing this now, as a thirty-three-year-old chemical engineer with two children." "Yes." I attempted to arch my eyebrows to suggest skepticism, but the sentiment did not translate. "Obviously, this story isn't really about basketball," he said. "I suppose it's kind of about basketball, because I was playing a basketball game on this particular afternoon. However, I have a feeling that the game itself is secondary." "It always is," I said. "Exactly. So, here's the situation: when I was in eighth grade, our basketball team was kind of terrible. You only play a ten-game schedule when you're in eighth grade, and we lost four of our first six games, a few of them by wide