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Scribner
September 2008
On Sale: September 16, 2008
288 pages
ISBN: 1416544186
EAN: 9781416544180
Hardcover
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Fiction
Somewhere in North Dakota, there is a town called Owl that
isn't there. Disco is over, but punk never happened. They
don't have cable. They don't really have pop culture,
unless you count grain prices and alcoholism. People work
hard and then they die. They hate the government and
impregnate teenage girls. But that's not nearly as awful as
it sounds; in fact, sometimes it's perfect. Mitch Hrlicka lives in Owl. He plays high school football
and worries about his weirdness, or lack thereof. Julia
Rabia just moved to Owl. She gets free booze and falls in
love with a self-loathing bison farmer who listens to Goats
Head Soup. Horace Jones has resided in Owl for seventy-
three years. He consumes a lot of coffee, thinks about his
dead wife, and understands the truth. They all know each
other completely, except that they've never met. Like a colder, Reagan-era version of The Last Picture Show
fused with Friday Night Lights, Chuck Klosterman's Downtown
Owl is the unpretentious, darkly comedic story of how it
feels to exist in a community where rural mythology and
violent reality are pretty much the same thing. Loaded with
detail and unified by a (very real) blizzard, it's
technically about certain people in a certain place at a
certain time...but it's really about a problem. And the
problem is this: What does it mean to be a normal person?
And there is no answer. But in Downtown Owl, what matters
more is how you ask the question.
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