The Last Magazine

April 21, 2014
Hastings, the late journalist whose 2010 Rolling Stone profile derailed the military career of Gen. Stanley McChrystal, writes about what he knew best—the world of news magazine publishing—in this posthumously published first novel. In 2002, a fictional Michael Hastings is interning at the weekly Magazine (read Newsweek, where the real Hastings once worked), where he bonds with burnt-out foreign correspondent A.E. Peoria. He also becomes involved with an upstart media website, Wretched.com, which calls print journalists “dead tree-ers.” But Hastings is such a passive character that readers may be drawn more to Peoria, who is forced to go on hiatus after an article he writes causes a riot in Iraq. Teaching journalism, he becomes involved with one of his students, a transsexual named Justina with an incredible backstory. Taking place roughly from the second Iraq War to Hurricane Katrina, this novel tries to recreate the last time that print magazines actually mattered. But without a strong protagonist, the novel suffers, especially in comparison to Tom Rachman’s far superior The Imperfectionists. Still, there is enough here to suggest that had Hastings not died in an auto crash in 2013, he would have mastered the novel form as well as he did journalism.

May 1, 2014
A posthumous novel about the news business.Hastings (The Operators, 2012, etc.) was one hell of a journalist, covering wars and geopolitical strife for venues like Rolling Stone and BuzzFeed. As it turns out, he would have made a fine novelist had he not died in a car accident in 2013. This "secret" novel was resurrected from his files by his widow, Elise Jordan; it's a messy, caustic and very funny satire. His protagonist is a young journalist also named Mike Hastings, who has just landed his first job at The Magazine in the dying days of traditional journalism. In wry metacommentary scattered throughout the text, the character Mike-who claims he's the one writing this book-reflects on just what it is he's writing. "Maybe I'm talking genres, and maybe the genre is corporate betrayal," he says. "Including the big decision that the entire media world is so interested in: Who and what is left standing?" Hastings, the author, tells the story of how Mike makes the journey from ambitious young man to cynical hack partially by showing us Mike's new friend A.E. Peoria, a classic old-school journalist who fuels his brilliant war reporting with alcohol and drugs and transvestite hookers. In the crevasse between his sanitary cubicle and Peoria's lewd adventures, our hero is also tracking the war of career strategy between his managing editor, Sanders Berman, and the international editor, Nishant Patel, whose favor Mike is carefully currying. Hastings chooses the start of the Iraq War to disrupt Mike's burgeoning career path. "There's war in the backdrop, looming and distant and not real for most of these characters, myself included," Mike says. In a way, the book reflects Hastings' career arc, from unpaid intern at Newsweek to one of the essential war correspondents of his generation.A ribald comedy about doing time in the trenches and the bitter choices that integrity demands.

COPYRIGHT(2014) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

June 1, 2014
The promise of this remarkable novel will never be fulfilled because it is that saddest of literary phenomenathe brilliant but posthumous first novel. Hastings, former Rolling Stone journalist and author of the memoir I Lost My Love in Baghdad (2008), was killed when his automobile crashed in June 2013. Here, in an apparently completed novel found in Hastings' files after his death, the protagonist Michael Hastings is an intern at The Magazine, a newsweekly, and author Hastings has keen and considerable insight into the functioning of a Time-like periodical between 2002 and 2005, Iraq to Katrina. War reporter A. E. Peoria, who has been to Iraq (and elsewhere) for the magazine and is equal parts Neil Sheehan and Hunter Thompson, is the novel's focus. The scenes of war are graphic and horrifying, and those of sex every bit as graphic and pretty horrifying themselves. Peoria has read his Conrad and Graham Greene, and Hastings, the novelist, reminds one at times of the early Robert Stone. There is an interesting twist, although with its development, the book jumps the tracks a bit. Nonetheless, this is powerful, sharp, often funny, and very compelling reading.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)

January 1, 2014

Hastings's 2010 Rolling Stone article "The Runaway General" won the George Polk Award and spurred the resignation of Gen. Stanley McChrystal; it also inspired Hastings's New York Times best-selling The Operators. At the time of his death in a fiery car crash in June 2013, Hastings was reportedly anxious about National Security Agency surveillance, and some press accounts called the crash suspect. This debut novel, retrieved from his files after his death, traces the career of a young journalist named Michael M. Hastings at the Magazine, a publication not unlike Newsweek, where Hastings started as an intern in 2002.

Copyright 2014 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.