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  • Published: 15 April 2018
  • ISBN: 9780525435549
  • Imprint: Knopf US
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 272
  • RRP: $50.00

Captive Audience

On Love and Reality TV




An intimate portrait of a marriage intertwined with a meditation on reality TV that reveals surprising connections and the meaning of an authentic life. A VINTAGE ORIGINAL.

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.

  • Published: 15 April 2018
  • ISBN: 9780525435549
  • Imprint: Knopf US
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 272
  • RRP: $50.00

About the author

Lucas Mann

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. His essays and stories have appeared in or are forthcoming from Wigleaf, Barrelhouse, New South, Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art, and The Kenyon Review. He teaches writing at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth and lives in Providence, Rhode Island.

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