IN this new collection of short stories, Toronto journalist and fiction writer Hal Niedzviecki offers a dizzying mix of tales that demonstrate how we are turning less humane in an increasingly nihilistic and media-soaked world. Niedzviecki’s 2009 non-fiction book, The Peep Diaries, cast an unflinching eye on how watching each other through the engine of Read more about Great review of Look Down in Winnipeg Free Press[…]
Peep Culture is a one-hour documentary film that is an insightful romp into a world where the internet and reality TV can make you a star. Youtube and Chatroulette are high-speed versions of lost village life, reconnecting the human tribe in the context of a culture that is celebrity and camera obsessed, when we are Read more about Docs Night Out: Peep Culture Screens at Camera[…]
Look Down is novelist, cultural commentator, and Broken Pencil magazine founder Hal Niedzviecki’s first collection of short stories since 1998. The stories here are raw, energetic, and, like the author’s 2001 novel Ditch, tend to focus on individual moments of intensity, often leaving the connective tissue between scenes implied. Niedzviecki covers considerable ground in Look Read more about Review of Look Down in Quill and Quire[…]
Susan G. Cole calls the book a “mixed bag” but does have lots of good things to say about the book. “But when Niedzviecki applies his astute observational powers to themes he understands through and through, he’s superb. In the very sharp Undead, about a man obsessed with videotaped funerals, he taps the web consciousness Read more about Review of Look Down in Now Magazine[…]
The first review of my new book of short stories has come out. It was published in Booklist. It is short and sweet so I’m including it here in its entirety. From Booklist, Spring 2011. “With dark humor and deep compassion, Niedzviecki, cultural critic and author of The Peep Diaries (2009), delivers a haunting collection Read more about First Review of Look Down[…]
Mickers finds himself at the opening long after it opens. He hopes for free wine, a few platters of greasy cheese at least. Instead, there are buckets of pink popcorn. A woman behind a table exchanges bottles of beer for three dollar donations. He sticks his hand in a bucket, steadies himself. There’s something gaudy on Read more about Excerpts from Look Down, This is Where It Must Have Happened[…]