Tacky: Love Letters to the Worst Culture We Have to Offer

ISBN: 0593312724

Condition: New

Product DescriptionAn irreverent and charming collection of deeply personal essays about the joys of low pop culture and bad taste, exploring coming of age in the 2000s in the age of Hot Topic, Creed, and frosted lip gloss-from the James Beard Award-nominated writer of the Catapult column "Store-Bought Is FineTacky is about the power of pop culture-like any art-to imprint itself on our lives and shape our experiences, no matter one's commitment to "good" taste. These fourteen essays are a nostalgia-soaked antidote to the millennial generation's obsession with irony, putting the aesthetics we hate to love-snakeskin pants, Sex and the City, Cheesecake Factory's gargantuan menu-into kinder and sharper perspective.Each essay revolves around a different maligned (and yet, Rax would argue, vital) cultural artifact, providing thoughtful, even romantic meditations on desire, love, and the power of nostalgia. An essay about the gym-tan-laundry exuberance of Jersey Shore morphs into an excavation of grief over the death of her father; in "You Wanna Be On Top," Rax writes about friendship and early aughts girlhood; in another, Guy Fieri helps her heal from an abusive relationship.The result is a collection that captures the personal and generational experience of finding joy in caring just a little too much with clarity, heartfelt honesty, and Rax King's trademark humor.A VINTAGE ORIGINALReviewONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: NPR, Bloomberg, KIRKUSEbullient . . . What [feels] new is the glitter and squalor and joy and exactness in Kings writing . . . It reads like sequential shots of Fireball Cinnamon Whisky. King has unfettered access to her mind at 14 or 15. Her Ode to Warm Vanilla Sugar is in league, as coming-of-age essays go, with Nora Ephrons A Few Words About Breasts . . . Like Katie Roiphe, King arrives in praise of messy lives. Like Toni Morrison in Song of Solomon, she advises: You got a life? Live it! . . . So winsome is the writing in Tacky that, most of the time, theres no other word for it but classy.-New York Times"Tacky is a Trojan horse of a book-itll charge into your life with acute, laugh-out-loud observations, then leave you crying about the Cheesecake Factory. Prepare accordingly.-Esquires The Best Books of Fall 2021These sharp, deeply insightful and laugh-out-loud meditations on modern Americana, from the Cheesecake Factory to Jersey Shore, add up to pop-culture anthropology.-PeopleReading Rax Kings writing feels like eating fettuccine alfredo at The Cheesecake Factory. Guzzling down the cream-coated 00s mall nostalgia, you cant help but smile between bites . . . King treats pop culture relics as an archaeologist would, at once reverential and eager to understand.-BustleTacky is a very funny book. Not just funny, I mean, SERIOUSLY FUNNY. King has the power to trick you into thinking you've got the joke all figured out, then suddenly reveals that you're going to experience a wealth of tender, thought-provoking emotions and guess what? You're gonna like it! On the sentence level, King's a wizard; she's able to wring the last drops of cool and sweet and sexy out of every moment. This isn't a book you read. It wants to be devoured. Rax King is a supremely gifted writer and Tacky is a masterly ode to unfettered, unrestrained, and unrepentant joy.-Kristen Arnett, author of Mostly Dead ThingsI am thankful for Tacky for how it broadens my own considerations of popular culture, of shame, and of celebration. The meditations in the book are equal parts comical, heartbreaking, and revelatory. A monument to uplifting the parts of popular culture that might otherwise be shrugged off and/or dismissed by those who don't have the imagination to celebrate what they might consider mundane. This book made me feel more at home with my obsessions, both small and large.-Hanif Abdurraqib, author of A Little Devil in AmericaGoddamn, Rax really tore this shit up. THIS BOOK IS G