The Wayback Machine - Paperback

by Daniel Falatko (Author)

The Wayback Machine, for all its antics, is in possession of a soulful undercurrent.....acid, uproarious, and punchily brilliant.

--The Metropolitan Review

Dripping with Easton-Ellisian satire, it's funny and oddly disgusting in equal measure, suffused with irony and savage pisstakes of the hipster literati.

-- Glasgow Review of Books

Samuel Richardson Prize finalist

Nathan thought he'd hit his lowest point when he landed in a federal penitentiary on drug trafficking charges. Back in NYC and living in his dead friend's apartment, he's at risk of descending even further. But as an aging former blogger and internet-famous music critic of the 2000s, Nathan has one thing going for him: a story to sell. And he's on the hunt for the highest bidder from a new media wasteland of podcasts and YouTube channels. It's a story that threatens to bring down his former employer, BAD HABITS Magazine, now risen from the ashes of pre-gentrified Brooklyn's hipster utopia to become a mainstream media titan.

What unfolds is a surreal cat-and-mouse game spiraling from the cold, dead heart of gentrified Williamsburg to the tent-colony-strewn streets of Westside LA. Zoomer podcast hosts, canceled media men, forgotten aughties indie artists, rockabilly Airbnb owners, and assassins in Jack White masks dot the landscape as Nathan races to promote his tale, while the media apparatus pulls out all the stops to kill the story-and perhaps Nathan himself.

"It was the last gasp of independent culture. It was all downhill from there, and it still has a long way to fall. It's bottomless, and we aren't even in the freefall yet. It's an era they're actively trying to erase, the last great time of possibility before it was all co-opted and turned back against the culture, relegated to the depths of the Wayback Machine."