Sign up for our newsletters to receive our Best of 2024 ezine!

Book Summary and Reviews of The Last Days of Video by Jeremy Hawkins

The Last Days of Video by Jeremy Hawkins

The Last Days of Video

by Jeremy Hawkins

  • Critics' Consensus (0):
  • Published:
  • Mar 2015, 304 pages
  • Rate this book

About this book

Book Summary

The video stores are dying. But most of you don't care. You've got your Netflix and your Redbox and your DVR, so why deal with VHS tapes or scratched DVDs? Why deal with the grumpy guy at the worn-down independent video store?

Well that grumpy guy is Waring Wax, and he's usually too drunk to worry about his declining business at Star Video, let alone his quickly evolving extinction in popular culture. But everything changes in his small college town when a bright and shiny Blockbuster Video opens nearby: Clearly, this means war.

So, Waring enlists the help of his two reluctant employees, wildly sexy Alaura and desperate virgin Jeff - who are almost as nuts as he is - to hatch a series of wild schemes to save their little store and fight against the corporate invaders. Together, these three misfits try to save Star Video while confronting, among other things, Waring's self-destructive tendencies, a life training cult, corporate bicycle gangs, and a Hollywood director who constantly sees the ghost of Alfred Hitchcock while in town shooting his latest film.

Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $45 for 12 months or $15 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

Reviews

Media Reviews

"Starred Review. A novel that manages to be both very funny and very sad, with an unrepentant belief in both movies and love served with a cleverness and irreverence that are difficult to resist." - Kirkus

"The novel seems to strive for a balance between nostalgia and quirkiness, but too often settles for the easy laugh." - Publishers Weekly

"The Last Days of Video is an unapologetic, quirky, and surprisingly moving elegy for the passing ofthe local rental hangouts." - Booklist

"The Last Days of Video is like the literary missing link, about a time when things were really real." - Daniel Wallace, author of Big Fish and The Kings and Queens of Roam

"The Last Days of Video is, as the title suggests, an elegy for an era, but it's an era that's going out with a lot of kicking and screaming. Funny, raucous, and deliciously irreverent, Jeremy Hawkins' debut novel offers up an engaging cast of characters who bicker and lust and love their way through the roller coaster ride of Star Video's final days." - Ben Fountain, author of Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk

"This is the Lucky Jim of video store novels. A comic page-turner - often really funny - with an originality and tenderness not often seen in first novels." - Clyde Edgerton, author of Killer Diller

"This hilarious novel manages to love, dissect, and make fun of our culture all at once ... This whole book is saturated in loss, and yet I laughed through every page." - Rebecca Lee, author of Bobcat and Other Stories

This information about The Last Days of Video was first featured in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.

Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.

Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $45 for 12 months or $15 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

Author Information

Jeremy Hawkins

Jeremy Hawkins earned an MFA in Fiction from the University of North Carolina Wilmington. He is the founder and lead editor of The Distillery (distilleryediting.com), a web-based editing service. He is also an independent bookseller at Flyleaf Books and teaches creative writing at the Carrboro ArtsCenter. And of course, he worked for almost ten years at VisArt Video, a family-owned chain of video stores in Chapel Hill/Durham, NC.

More Author Information

Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $45 for 12 months or $15 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

More Recommendations

Readers Also Browsed . . .

more literary fiction...

Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $45 for 12 months or $15 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

Top Picks

  • Book Jacket: The Love Elixir of Augusta Stern
    The Love Elixir of Augusta Stern
    by Lynda Cohen Loigman
    Lynda Cohen Loigman's delightful novel The Love Elixir of Augusta Stern opens in 1987. The titular ...
  • Book Jacket: Small Rain
    Small Rain
    by Garth Greenwell
    At the beginning of Garth Greenwell's novel Small Rain, the protagonist, an unnamed poet in his ...
  • Book Jacket: Daughters of Shandong
    Daughters of Shandong
    by Eve J. Chung
    Daughters of Shandong is the debut novel of Eve J. Chung, a human rights lawyer living in New York. ...
  • Book Jacket: The Women
    The Women
    by Kristin Hannah
    Kristin Hannah's latest historical epic, The Women, is a story of how a war shaped a generation ...

BookBrowse Book Club

Book Jacket
In Our Midst
by Nancy Jensen
In Our Midst follows a German immigrant family’s fight for freedom after their internment post–Pearl Harbor.
Who Said...

Failure is the condiment that gives success its flavor

Click Here to find out who said this, as well as discovering other famous literary quotes!

Wordplay

Big Holiday Wordplay 2024

Enter Now

Your guide toexceptional          books

BookBrowse seeks out and recommends the best in contemporary fiction and nonfiction—books that not only engage and entertain but also deepen our understanding of ourselves and the world around us.