The Nostalgia Echo

Nostalgia is coming back around. A professional narrator named Gene is searching for his birth mother, armed with nothing but a Polaroid photograph of her at a 1976 book release party for Dr. Everett Barnes’ Nostalgia: Its Origins and Attributes. Dr. Barnes, meanwhile, is about to become famous for a book he wrote thirty years ago. Nostalgia – once considered a potentially-fatal disease when it was first diagnosed in the 17th century – has been relegated to the realm of the sentimental, but based on Dr. Barnes’ theories, people are beginning to reconsider its dangerous effects: doctors return to the old cures; pharmaceutical companies solicit Dr. Barnes to endorse the new anti-nostalgic medications they have developed; and Gene seeks out Dr. Barnes to somehow realign the missing pieces of his past into a story with a beginning, middle, and ending. With wit and humor, The Nostalgia Echo presents a revealing look at the problem of progress--that moving forward often means leaving something behind.

"THE NOSTALGIA ECHO is the best book you will read this year, or any year: the exact antidote to all those tired, humorless, beige-colored novels of recent memory, the writing here pops with both a dazzling intelligence and a devastating depth of character. Mr. Hess carries on in the great tradition of Vonnegut, D. Barthelme, and every other genius literary madman." —Joe Meno The wit and inventiveness of Mickey Hess’s world was what first pulled me in, but ultimately it’s the characters, the depth of their struggles, that makes The Nostalgia Echo remarkable. Hess shines a new light on age old questions — Who are we? How can we find what we’re looking for? — and produces a novel so stunningly engrossing, I didn’t want it to end. —Laura van den Berg, author of What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us The Nostalgia Echo is ridiculously witty in its observations of the absurdities of pop culture. But more importantly, Mickey Hess has created the most inventive narration technique I’ve ever witnessed. —Joey Goebel, author of Commonwealth

An Associate Professor of English at Rider University, Mickey Hess is well-known as a professional blurb artist via his online column “I Will Blurb Any Book Within 24 Hours” at The Rumpus. He is also the author of six other books, including Is Hip Hop Dead? The Past, Present, and Future of America’s Most Wanted Music, Hip Hop in America: A Regional Guide, and Big Wheel at the Cracker Factory.