Looking Forward to It

Novelist, journalist, and wandering scribe Stephen Elliott does not know what to think of America's voters, of 2004's desperate and over-heated run for the presidency, or of the legitimacy of the political system en masse. He doesn't know whether to love Howard Dean or try to love John Kerry or try, simply, to get excited about politics. But what he does know is that most Americans are as confused, taxed, and brokenhearted as he is.

Looking Forward to It is thus the chronicle of one ordinary fellow's skeptical—and often hilarious—journey through the election process. With the author on the campaign trail, we meet washed-out campaign managers, idealistic publicists, corrupted journalists, world-weary auditorium janitors, recovering drug addicts, and, of course, politicians. Elliott's engaging report fully documents a journey into the center of "the thing," our country, where Americans high and low come together to participate in the most profound and fundamental gesture of democracy: the election.

Praise

"Stephen Elliott is one of the most versatile and gifted young writers we have. His fiction is wrenching, raw, and unsafe. His political writing, on the other hand, is savvy, loose, very funny, and—truly—fully of rare insights. Also: he is quite hairy."—Dave Eggers

"Hunter S. Thompson, Norman Mailer, Richard Ben Cramer: the great, all-American genre of the political campaign in extenso (and in extremis) has had its Homers and Boswells. To that list we can now add Stephen Elliott. Hilarious, strange, electrifyingly written, and heart-pumpingly idealistic, Looking Forward to It wins every literary caucus and primary in a landslide."—Tom Bissell, author of Chasing the Sea

About the Author(s)

Stephen Elliott

Stephen Elliott, editor of the anthology Politically Inspired, is also the author of four novels, including What It Means to Love You and Happy Baby. A contributing writer for The Believer, the San Francisco Chronicle, Newsday, The Village Voice, and McSweeney's, Elliott teaches at Stanford University.

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Excerpt

I. Looking Forward to It
A nation is a group of people united by a mistaken view about the past and a hatred of their neighbors.
-Ernest Renan

July 2-3
No Time for Explanations; Cedar Rapids, Iowa City, Washington; Davenport; Cedar Rapids, Car Politics

It's been a long, boring summer and it's only July. July 2003, to be exact, nearly a year and a half before two people you would never invite over to dinner, and probably wouldn't want to live in your town, will come head to head in the 2004 presidential election.

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