Meet the Author Tonight!!!

The author of The Average American Male and The Lie returns with a shocking, salacious, and surprisingly subtle new novel of the average American family. Like Neil Strauss and Nick Hornby, Chad Kultgen has the capacity to enthrall and astonish even the most ardent readers of contemporary literary fiction. In Men, Women, and Children, his incisive vision, unerring prose, and red-light-district imagination are at their most ambitious and surprising, as he explores the sexual pressures of junior high school students and their parents navigating the internet’s shared landscape of pornography, blogs, social networking, and its promise of opportunities, escapes, reinvented identities, and unexpected conflicts.

Anyone who has read Kultgen before understands just how very appropriate this teaser preview is, according to Jackie:



Meet the man himself  TONIGHT at 7:30 pm at our Historic Lodo store.

Jackie says:
"I have a sort of love/hate thing going with Chad Kultgen's books.  In The Average American Male, it seemed like he worded everything for shock value and the biggest cringe factor he could get.  But after
polling some of my average American guy friends about some of the points in the book, most said, "Ya, that's pretty much right."   The Lie, Kultgen's second book centering the concept of the man/woman relationship dynamic was just as brutal to my tender heart and polled, once again, as pretty accurate in my guy-friends pool.

So, when I received the third book, Men, Women and Children, I was very afraid.  But, as I began to read it, I recognized all sorts of people I know in its pages.  I don't need to poll this time.  Kultgen still speaks the truth, albeit in the most graphic, TMI, sexual way possible, but somehow gentler than he has before (don't ask me to explain that, I'm still working through that myself).  This book deals with families, and all the relationships that are involved, and all of the secrets they keep from each other.  There is a profound emotionality to this book that hasn't been present before--there are moments of genuine heart-break in these pages that are stark, raw, and desperately true.  These stories are digging much farther than the grubby surface to something dark but meaningful, almost illuminating.  This is far from a comfortable or easy read, but I found it to be rather profound (as well as profane--don't say I didn't warn you), and I'm still struggling with some of the ideas that are brought up in it. I'm impressed, to say the least."