The Revolution Will Be Accessorized: BlackBook Presents Dispatches from the New Counterculture

By Jay McInerney and Aaron Hicklin

Book Overview

Since it first went to press in 1996, BlackBook has established itself as an arbiter of style, and a forum for new and dynamic writing. The Revolution Will Be Accessorized gathers many of the magazine's strongest pieces, and the result is a star-studded collection that addresses the intersection of pop culture, the arts, politics, and fashion, with provocative contributions from many of today's best writers, including: Augusten Burroughs on Christmas with his mother Jonathan Ames on his boyhood sneaker fetish Meghan Daum on L.A. bourgeois Also included are pieces by Neal Pollack, Sam Lipsyte, Joan Didion, Naomi Klein, William T. Vollmann, DBC Pierre, Emma Forrest, and Douglas Coupland, among others. Raw, edgy, and always insightful, The Revolution Will Be Accessorized is a window on to what's happening outside the mainstream.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0060847328
• ISBN13: 9780060847326
• Release Date: May 2006
• Publisher: Harper Perennial
• Length: 240 Pages
• Weight: 0.45 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.3" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

Wake Up Call for a Comatose Nation

Brilliantly caustic with a veritable honeycomb of literary talent, The Revolution Will be Accessorized was a bit like acid reflux on the lives we lead in today's branded society. Authors like Meghan Daum, Naomi Klein, Chuck Palaniuk, Mike Albo and many more pose illuminating viewpoints stark enough to hiccup one from the ever present lull of apathy: Beware of the stealth networker, is "left" the new center? Has fashion supplanted art and made it meaningless? Has it maintained or diffused class distinctions? Is Harold and Maude the key to understanding the fruitless language of relationships? What lays beyond the velvet ropes? How branded have you become? If you were to ever wonder where the path of cultural subversion leads, then look no further from this back-water highway(just be sure to look out for the road signs). Delving into the minds of these authors, makes you wonder if you have been hibernating for the last 10 years in a subterranean cavern with only the sound of your brain cells popping to keep you company. This is a debate on evaporative culture and its consequences. Thank you Aaron Hicklin for destroying the pod underneath my bed before it germinated!

Fun, quick, no advertisements

This collection of essays and writings posesses a hipster charm. BlAckBook is a fashion magazine. This threw me off at first for I care little for fashion or why people write about it. I bought it for the names of so many great writers. It was a worthwhile read. The worst of the book being about things I would expect from such a neo-hipster movement: Being bourgeois, denying one's own identity as bourgeios. Yet the further you read the more insight you get. Some satires spotted through memoir-esque retellings and curiois essays make the book wholly entertaining.