Reviews

"A perceptive, compassionate, often comical, frequently laugh-out-loud hilarious picaresque"

-San Antonio Express-News Read the whole review

"Silverstein's adventures and prose are first-rate."

-Associated Press Read the whole review

"The sheer pleasure of reading this book eclipses any impulse to split hairs regarding documentary and fiction. Silverstein blends the two marvelously, approximating, if not replicating, a lived experience."

-BOMBlog Read the whole review

"His genial presence, in a beat-up Toyota with plenty of curiosity and workable Spanish, is a constant. Whether he's writing about retired ranch hands, his landlords, Mexican construction workers or Nazi mechanics, we trust him ...When Silverstein is front and center, making wry jokes, musing about the road and what journalism might mean, "Nothing Happened and Then It Did" has a thoughtful momentum."

–Los Angeles Times Read the whole review

"Silverstein’s wonderful, hybrid “Nothing Happened and Then It Did’’ uses the border between fiction and nonfiction not as an area of prohibition but as a place of play and dialogue. In this, his first book, Silverstein, a rare master practitioner of long-form narrative journalism, offers a hilarious, subtle, and empathetic examination of writing and identity."

–Boston Globe Read the whole review

"This greatly entertaining and extremely funny book was conceived out of a clear dissatisfaction with our labels of literary designation. But the revolt is an indeterminate one, for the book does not slip through the bars designed to hold it; it embraces them. This is, in the end, why Nothing Happened and Then It Did is so weird. In its attempt to break the literary law, it dutifully stops at every red light. It is almost as though Silverstein asks you to follow him into a battle that both you and he know he will lose. He is such a good nonfiction writer that you follow him anyway. He is such a good nonfiction writer, in fact, that you do not believe a word he says."

–The New Republic Read the whole review

"The road novel—or the road half-novel—has rarely been funnier or more appealing than it is in Jake Silverstein’s NOTHING HAPPENED AND THEN IT DID...Silverstein distinguishes “fact” from “fiction,” but the distinction ceases to matter as one is swept into this account of postcollege purposelessness...his quest to become a roving eyeball is so entertaining that it doesn’t matter what’s happening, or what’s not."

–Harper's Magazine Read the whole review (subscriber only)

"Texas Monthly editor Mr. Silverstein attempts a high-wire hybrid act, weaving together his incandescent journalism--he wrote the classic Harper's feature "What Is Poetry? And Does It Pay?"--within a fictional framework about the reporter hunting down the stories."

–New York Observer | Must-Read Spring Books

“In his first book, Silverstein, editor of Texas Monthly, offers eight wry essays with one intriguing twist: half of them are fact and half of them are fiction. He has a great deal of fun tweaking boundaries and bending perceptions, for it is often the factual accounts that strain credulity . . . A terrific combination of droll humor and fine writing makes this title one to savor.”

–Booklist

“The juxtaposition of fact and fiction makes an engaging game of each piece, while Silverstein’s eye for oblique detail and an accessible style in the tradition of adventurer-journalists like Samuel Clemens, Susan Orlean and Hunter S. Thompson brings him journalistic success where he claimsto fail.”

–Kirkus

Nothing Happened And Then It Did Book Cover

ADVANCE PRAISE

“Nothing Happened and Then It Did cleverly eludes categorization. Like the best hybrids—say, the liger—the result is a creation both strange and rare: part new journalism, part old-fashioned bildungsroman, sometimes a map, other times a puzzle, by turns whimsical and edifying, very funny yet deeply profound. Jake Silverstein is the book’s author and hapless hero, a character composite not unlike Cervantes and his fictional sidekick Sancho Panza, or Kerouac’s Dean Moriarty, who sends himself on a zigzagging quest for story and self. The great accomplishment is that the reader, in the end, does not care what is fact, what is fiction, because she has happily arrived at that much more elusive grail truth.”

–Antonya Nelson
author of Nothing Right

“This book (Is it a novel? Or a memoir? Both? Something else?) is hilarious, poetic, lovely, and disturbing. It’s filled with ghosts, bad poets with great hearts, treasure hunts, death-wish race car drivers, and Mexican kids who weep when denied the chance to eat at McDonald’s. It’s a eulogy for dead American towns, dead American ideas, and dead American jobs. This book crosses every aesthetic border as it crosses geographic, racial, and economic borders. I read it in one sitting on a flight from Seattle to New York. You'll devour it that quickly, too.”

–Sherman Alexie
author of The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-time Indian

“Move over Tom Wolfe, a new New Journalist has entered the world of arts-and-letters with a flat-out hilarious road trip meditation along the U.S.–Mexican border. Jake Silverstein’s marvelous Nothing Happened and Then It Did is so perfectly crafted that it should be mandatory reading in college journalism classes. I’m envious of his talent.”

–Douglas Brinkley
author of The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America (2009)

“Jake Silverstein’s stories dance like the mirages of the Chihuahuan desert or the mysterious Marfa lights. Some are true, he says, and some aren’t. But you wouldn’t know the difference to read them, and after you’ve read them you wonder if the distinction isn’t a fancy that fails west of the Pecos. A captivating first book.”

–H. W. Brands
author of Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and
Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt

“Jake Silverstein’s first book, Nothing Happened and Then It Did, is a wistful, insightful masterpiece of our times. It’s a brilliant, funny, lush and poetical account of a young man coming of age in journalism and life – a roving eyeball looking for the truth that none of us ever seem to find.”

–Kinky Friedman
author of Heroes of a Texas Childhood

“In his impressive debut, Jake Silverstein crisscrosses the border between fact and fiction, and vividly shows us that what ultimately exists between these two illusions is the art of storytelling. This is writer you will want to follow no matter where he takes you.”

–Oscar Casares
author of Brownsville and Amigoland

“Jake Silverstein has written a gorgeous, hilarious romp of a book that ends on a moving note of stillness and meditation. What he writes about one of his own antic characters is true about Silverstein himself: he manages in these pages to become a kind of 'Richter scale of human experience'. I haven't read a more successful merging of the real and the imaginary since Frederick Exley's A Fan's Notes.”

–Anthony Giardina
author of White Guys

“You’ll find pleasures on every page of this warm and funny book. I’ve never read anything like it. It is both wholly original and completely companionable. Jake Silverstein’s Nothing Happened and Then It Did is a masterful literary debut. It is also a vivid, ironic portrait of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, an area that increasingly interests us. Literature is always a fine way of knowing. So we know Dickens’ London, Tolstoy and Gorki’s Russia, the China of Chen Congwen, the Iceland of Holder Laxness. So we will know Jake Silverstein’s southwestern Texas and small-town Mexico.”

–Annie Dillard
author of The Maytrees