I’m not sure what qualifies a group to be considered a cult. Whether that label gets attached due to sheer moxie or a certain number of attendees needing to be involved. Regardless, call us a cult of three if you will: David Nutt, Sam Lipsyte, and me. Because we’re all zealots who worship at the altar of Hob Broun. Although David and I are both diehard Sam Lipsyte fans, which would really fuck up the dynamics at the Kool-Aid table. Again, I don’t know how any of this works.
What I do know is that currently Hob Broun and his body of work are little-known, and that needs to change. Ask about Hob in front of the most bookish savant you know, and you’ll likely get dead-eyed blinks back. A bit of hemming and hawing. Maybe a discreet Googling on their phone just out of sight. There’s no grand mystery. Sometimes artists just get overlooked. Most times, artists just get overlooked.
But Hob is worth the investigation. I’m not going to lay out the details around his surgery and subsequent disability, because like any artist suffering from an extreme hardship, there’s been a bit of a mythology attached to it, and that can sometimes overshadow the work. It’s worth looking into if you’re interested, because it was a major part of his life and greatly impacted his writing process post-Odditorium, his first published novel, but beyond that, I’d say what draws me to Hob is that he writes such devastatingly lyrical prose about people on the outs, people just trying to scrape by in a hyper-consumerist 1980s America. His sentences have a hard-edged darkness to them, but also ring with a kind of brio that is hard to find in modern fiction.
The opening of Inner Tube even begins as almost an affront to the reader: “You’re not going to like this…” And then proceeds to describe the narrator’s mother’s suicide as “cancel[ling] an unrelenting life by plunging her head through the twenty-six-inch screen of a Motorola color television.”
Recently, there’s been a little bit of a Hob resurgence. The now-defunct literary magazine Egress ran a folio dedicated to him. There was a brief essay about him on a Tin House blog. And Calamari Archive has decided to re-release his earlier novels and collection alongside newly discovered, never-before-published work.
I’m not sure if there’s a word for a small cult, but we’re taking members. Call us a Hob.
Gene Kwak: Dave, start us off. How did you come across Hob’s work? Did you know about his life and hardships before coming to it?
David Nutt: In 2010, I was in the Syracuse MFA program, and Garielle Lutz was a visiting lecturer for a semester, teaching a class she put together called “The Sentential Event.” It was sort of a crash course in everything she’d learned from Gordon Lish and the writers in his orbit. She mentioned Hob and the rigor with which he composed his books. At that point, I thought I knew all the major writers Lish had published, but Hob’s name was new to me—and what a name at that. I went straight to the library and got Inner Tube, and I was floored by it. How had I snoozed on this guy? He seemed like the missing link between DeLillo, Lipsyte, and Nathanael West. After a few pages, I forgot about his condition. I was just so taken by that voice, its lacerating wit, the lonely timbre of it. A total rebuke of the crass idiocy of Reaganized 1980s America.
How did he pop up on your radar?
GK: I couldn’t remember at first, but I had a vague sense of learning about Hob from Sam Lipsyte. I just looked it up now, and I think it was from this “A Year in Reading” article on The Millions in 2010, where Sam mentioned re-reading Cardinal Numbers. That must’ve been it. I was in the second year of my MFA program, and I remember being really into the Lish stuff. I want to say my buddy, Blake Butler, was doing this thing where he was trying to find all the Lish-edited Knopf books and running through them. I was doing the same, and also buying up old issues of The Quarterly. I’ve since shaken off some of those influences; it was like being really into punk when you’re young. You move past it, but the effect is in some ways imprinted on your DNA. It’s funny, because I was in Boise talking to people like Kimberly King Parsons and Nicole Treska recently, who were in the Lish classes from that era that I had even been invited by Lish to participate in, but I didn’t want to do the bus ride from Boston to NY and then sit through six hours of not being able to pee while this white-haired, white man yelled at me about how my sentences sucked. Which is all to say, I was super into the Lish aesthetics, but I kind of prefer the early Hob stuff. From before his surgery and the leaner, Lish-ed out influence.
Okay, so we’re both big fans, but when did you start hearing about the unreleased work? I had heard rumors about the final novel, but hadn’t heard about Newsreels until you put it on my radar.
DN: But I’m still really into punk! Shit! Anyway, Sam really is the linchpin in all of this. The semester after I took that class with Garielle, Sam visited Syracuse to do a reading. At dinner that night, I asked him about Broun, and he mentioned that Broun’s partner, Freda, had heard he was a fan and contacted him. Sam had also been talking with Gian DiTrapano from Tyrant Books about getting Broun back into print. As you know, Gian and I first met in a workshop Sam taught in 2003, so we all go back a ways. Sam connected Freda with Gian, but ultimately Gian wasn’t able to reissue the books. A few years later, though, she sent him a big box of Broun ephemera—unpublished stories, journals, letters, notes—as well as this early novel Newsreels, which even Sam hadn’t heard about. At first, Gian was gung-ho about putting that one out, but then he started to waffle. He sent it to me and asked for my thoughts, and I told him he should do it. But it just sort of sat on the back burner. Then, when Gian died in 2021, I figured that was it; the project died with him. It always kinda ate at me, the idea that there was this treasure trove of unpublished Broun sitting in a box in Italy, never to be seen again. Then last summer, Derek White from Calamari, who was good pals with Gian, said he wanted to get Odditorium, Inner Tube, and Cardinal Numbers back into print. I told him the whole saga, sent him Newsreels, and connected him with Sam (who gave us more goodies, including Wild Coast, the book Broun was working on when he died, which Sam got from a childhood friend of Broun’s). Then Derek got in touch with Freda, and she gave him her blessing to start publishing/republishing this stuff. Derek actually just went to Naples this month and got his hands on the infamous box. A lot of amazing stuff in there.
What were your immediate impressions of Newsreels? Where do you think it fits among the other three books?
GK: I mean, it feels closer to Odditorium tonally and sententially to me. Did he write it before the surgery? I know among Broun fans, I think more folks gravitate toward his Lish-edited stuff, the hard-wrought sentences. The tighter constructions. And I love that, too, but I kind of like the wildness and verbosity of the earlier stuff. Is that timeline right? When did he work on Newsreels? You said it was an earlier novel, correct? I have a few buddies who I put onto Odditorium, and they enjoyed the sentences but said it felt slow-moving. That old plotless critique. And I don’t blame them, but I like that his early novels roam a little. Also, you had to do some edits on Newsreels. Can you get into some of those details? How you approached big picture edits, sentence-level revisions, etc.
DN: Yeah, he wrote two books before Odditorium: Newsreels and Seizures, which was a collection of stories, some of which he radically reworked for Cardinal Numbers. One of the great things we got from Sam is a fascinating audio recording of Broun being interviewed in 1985. He calls Newsreels “the first serious book I wrote” and mentions it was rejected by around 28 publishers, at least one of them quite vehemently. The editor thought the book was vile. Broun was delighted and said, “That’s what it’s all about, you want to get into somebody’s head.” One of the things I like about Newsreels is it serves as a tidy Broun primer. It has the wild careening of Odditorium, the psychological burnout and media fixation of Inner Tube, and its characters anticipate the lost souls who populate Cardinal Numbers. It also might be his weirdest book. All its random vignettes and oddball detours make it feel like one of Robert Altman’s shaggy-dog ’70s films, yet everything is spliced together very tightly. Overall, the prose is exceptional, with so many wonderful verbal riffs and eccentric descriptions and references. I didn’t want to tamper with any of that. What needed work was the dialogue. Much of it was obvious and repetitious compared to the punchy, concise talk in his other books, so I trimmed anything that felt amateurish. I also reined in the raunchiness a bit. There was a level of grotesquerie that Broun outgrew in his later works. I streamlined some of that, again, to reduce the redundancy and let the best lines shine. At first I wasn’t sure if I should cut anything at all, so I asked Sam. He encouraged me to channel my inner Lish. I didn’t go that far, but it helped to have his vote of confidence. I really looked to the other three books as the tablets from the mount, you know? Any guidance I needed was right there. And Derek, of course. He’s the reason we’re able to talk about this. Calamari is truly doing the Lord’s work.
It’s interesting to think about how Broun’s quadriplegia impacted his writing style versus the influence of Lish. According to that interview, he was 100 to 150 pages into Inner Tube when he had that botched surgery. He ended up rewriting everything with a greater focus on the sentences because he had to work so slowly and really mull every word. Unfortunately, Lish’s reputation kind of clouds how we see a lot of the writers he published. And Broun’s quadriplegia sort of functions in a similar way. That mythology is so overpowering. But we can see in Odditorium and Newsreels, the verve, the voice, the caustic humor; it’s all there. What do you think is Broun’s legacy? How do we see him in 2026?
GK: I’m glad you brought that up: the mythology behind both Lish’s influence and also the surgery and disability. Lish is a giant in the annals of literary history, and the circumstance around Broun’s disability is one of those things you can’t help but be moved by. That said, and this is going to come off as cliché perhaps, but the work stands alone. The work has to stand alone, right? I hope new readers find it and are moved by it, laugh at it, awed by it, swayed in all the ways we want to be swayed by art that impresses itself upon us. I hope he gets remembered, and I hope that his work sticks with readers in the way I tend to remember my favorites: a random line popping in my head during my daily errand runs, the mantric intonement of it under my breath acting like some kind of linguistic fidget toy to help me get through my days.
What do you think about Broun’s legacy now?
DN: Agree, agree, agree. You know, it’s very telling that the author bio for Inner Tube makes no mention of his surgery or condition, nor do any of the stories in Cardinal Numbers nod to it. The only conclusion I can draw is that Broun didn’t want his work to be read through that particular lens, as the kids are fond of saying. And, frankly, the work doesn’t need it. It’s kinda crazy to remember Inner Tube was published only a few months after DeLillo’s White Noise. Both books are humming on the same strange cultural and aesthetic frequencies, and Broun’s is just as staggeringly great. He really was doing high-wire work; the best of that—or any—era, as far as I’m concerned. It’s tragic he only lived to be 37. But luckily, we have those three, now four, books. And there is that tranche of unpublished stuff, which Derek and I are stoked about. So hopefully we’ll keep pouring more Broun into the world until everyone catches on, catches up.
Damn, Gene & David talking about Hob's work… This is the kind of sicko shit I'm here for
So great