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

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 glossfrom the James Beard Awardnominated writer of the Catapult column StoreBought Is FineTacky is about the power of pop culturelike any artto imprint itself on our lives and shape our experiences, no matter ones commitment to good taste. These fourteen essays are a nostalgiasoaked antidote to the millennial generations obsession with irony, putting the aesthetics we hate to lovesnakeskin pants, Sex and the City, Cheesecake Factorys gargantuan menuinto 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 gymtanlaundry 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 Kings 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 comingofage 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 TimesTacky is a Trojan horse of a bookitll charge into your life with acute, laughoutloud observations, then leave you crying about the Cheesecake Factory. Prepare accordingly.Esquires The Best Books of Fall 2021These sharp, deeply insightful and laughoutloud meditations on modern Americana, from the Cheesecake Factory to Jersey Shore, add up to popculture anthropology.PeopleReading Rax Kings writing feels like eating fettuccine alfredo at The Cheesecake Factory. Guzzling down the creamcoated 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 youve got the joke all figured out, then suddenly reveals that youre going to experience a wealth of tender, thoughtprovoking emotions and guess what? Youre gonna like it! On the sentence level, Kings a wizard; shes able to wring the last drops of cool and sweet and sexy out of every moment. This isnt 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 dont 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