Vulture just announced that Chuck Klosterman will be releasing a new book this June. The new book, What If We’re Wrong: Thinking about the Present As If It Were the Past, follows an interesting thematic vein (much like his last non-fiction work, I Wear the Black Hat). This time, though, it’s the idea of our post-modern certainty and
how it might look in a prospective historical context. From the Vulture announcement:
“We live in a period of extremely high certitude about what we believe, and we’re completely obsessed with the present tense, as if the present will always be this way,” Klosterman says. But any study of human history will tell you that’s never been the case, and the book is Klosterman’s effort to explore what our current standards of thought might be overlooking. He spoke to Richard Linklater about dreams, once considered the most important window into the human psyche. He spoke to Neil deGrasse Tyson and Brian Greene about the possibility of our basic understanding of gravity being overturned one day, as Aristotle’s was. And he looked at the changing reputations of various authors in an attempt to understand what makes literature get “remembered.” As Klosterman put it to us, “Could the most famous American novelist of this period be completely unknown, in the case of Kafka, or known but not respected, like Melville?” (Or even a blogger at a well-regarded pop-culture site? Hmmm.)
You can read the rest of the Vulture post here.
Add this to my list of things to look forward to in 2016.
(image from amazon.com)
(and yes, the cover just might look like that)




