Captive Audience On Love and Reality TV

From the national bestselling author of Lord Fear and Class A comes "a tender, humane, comic, brainy, unsettling achievement” (Paul Lisicky, author of The Narrow Door: A Memoir of Friendship) about what it means to live an authentic life and what it means to love a person. 

In Lucas Mann's trademark vein—fiercely intelligent, self-deprecating, brilliantly observed, idiosyncratic, personal, funny, and infuriating—Captive Audience is an appreciation of reality television wrapped inside a love letter to his wife, with whom he shares the guilty pleasure of watching "real" people bare their souls in search of celebrity. Captive Audience resides at the intersection of popular culture with the personal; the exhibitionist impulse, with the schadenfreude of the vicarious, and in confronting some of our most suspect impulses reveals surprising connections and the meaning of an authentic life.

LUCAS MANN was born in New York City and received his MFA from the University of Iowa, where he was the Provost's Visiting Writer in Nonfiction. He is also the author of Lord Fear: A Memoir, which was named one of the best books of 2015 by The Miami Herald, Kirkus Reviews, Paper Magazine, Largehearted Boy, and Oprah, and Class A: Baseball in the Middle of Everywhere, which was named one of the best books of 2013 by The San Francisco Chronicle. His essays have appeared in Guernica, BuzzFeed, Slate, and The Kenyon Review, among others. He recently received a 2018 NEA Fellowship for Literature. He teaches creative writing at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth and lives in Providence, Rhode Island with his wife.