The Last Magazine

~Praise for Panic 2012~
"Hastings knows how to ask hard questions ... An entertainment ... Aspiring politicos and their staffers, though, will want [PANIC 2012] for its astute look at the tricks of the trade."--Kirkus Reviews

"Panic 2012 is an often outrageous, irreverent riff on politics and media...a wild ride."--Shelf Awareness

"For any political junkie, this is a read-all-night revelation of the hard-fought 2012 presidential campaign. Hastings moves at warp speed with the press contingent through grueling travel schedules and second-rate accommodations, all the while aware of gamesmanship among so-called colleagues, the White House press corps, "some of the most vicious and competitive journalists on the planet." Highlights include a chronology of the Benghazi attack, the moment when Vice President Biden jumped ahead of the president with comments on gays, and Obama's participation in an online Q&A which influenced an estimated 30,000 people to register to vote."--Publisher's Weekly, starred review

~Praise for The Operators~
"An impressive feat of journalism by a Washington outsider who seemed to know more about what was going on in Washington than most insiders did."--The New York Times

"Hastings has written the funniest book I have read on the war and the US presence in Afghanistan--and it's not easy being funny about Afghanistan or the US Army. The last time someone tried it was in the 1980s, when P.J. O'Rourke wrote hilarious pieces--also for Rolling Stone--about the Mujahideen in Peshawar and later the Taliban.... Hastings's sense of humor is sly, cynical, and disrespectful, but it is honest....Hastings is an American kind of dissident. " --Ahmed Rashid, The New York Review of Books

"Superb...One of the most eye-opening accounts...from one of the bravest and most intrepid journalists." -Salon.com

"It demands to be read...this is a book of great consequence, not a pop-culture puff piece, which some of its deriders claim it is. The Operators seems destined to join the pantheon of the best of GWOT literature, not just for its rock-and-roll details, but for its piercing chronicles of a world gone mad."--The Daily Beast

"Brings a fresh eye and a brutally authentic voice to America's decade-old misadventure in Afghanistan."--Los Angeles Times

"Even from the grave Mr. Hastings has demonstrated anew an ability to reframe the debate. The novel....reads as vivid archaeology that reveals much about the present moment... The milieu of the book paints a picture of a treehouse where like minds connive and look for an opening. But far below them, there is the sound of sawing steady and implacable. The tree will fall....Remarkable."--David Carr, The New York Times

"Scathing, funny, rollicking."--The Barnes and Noble Review

"Frenetic and darkly funny." Rolling Stone

"Terrifyingly funny ....entrancing, compelling." Shelf Awareness

"The Last Magazine is tender and brutal, worldly and inbred, high-minded and gross, smartly rendered and rough around the edges -- and quite often hilarious...The Last Magazine is the funniest, most savage takedown of the American news media since Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail '72, by his hero Hunter S. Thompson."--James Rosen, The Washington Post

"[The Last Magazine] is fast and funny and humane. When I put it down, it called to be picked up again." Dwight Garner, The New York Times

"What makes this novel work--really, I can't think of a better little tome to take to the beach--is that it's just so much fun, so wicked, so amusing, and so brilliantly observed. The caricatures of people living and dead (career-wise) are only part of its charm. I haven't read a better send-up of hackery since the last time I dove into Evelyn Waugh's 1938 classic Scoop."--Christopher Dickey, The Daily Beast

"As a provocative piece of thinly fictionalized nonfiction, [The Last Magazine] is a posthumous mission accomplished...Hastings's book is a message in a bottle that has belatedly washed up on shore to force us to remember how we landed where we are now."--Frank Rich, New York Magazine

"That voice. That witty, subversive voice we thought we'd lost, is back for one last romp. Hastings decodes the culture even more incisively in fiction, with wild bursts of imaginative mischief. So damn funny."--Dave Cullen, New York Times bestselling author of Columbine

"[Hastings'] keen eye for the creatures of the New York media universe focuses on the fabricated lifestyles of that world's desperate inhabitants. Here, no one is immune....The suffering amid the insufferable is comic gold, and Hastings had no time for heroes. The world he created is filled with lost boys stamping their feet for validation. This could be the perfect summer bro comedy. Paging Judd Apatow!"--Mark Guarino, Chicago Tribune

"A convincing account of the perils of war - and of the journalistic wars of an institution under siege from New Media.... The Last Magazine remains a loving account of a profession Hastings believed was honorable and tried to honor. Only the guilty have something to fear." Paul Wilner, San Francisco Chronicle

"Surely Michael Hastings would have savored the taste of revenge had he lived to see his first novel, The Last Magazine published...The humor throughout is searing....entertaining."--Sherryl Connelly, New York Daily News

The promise of this remarkable novel will never be fulfilled because it is that saddest of literary phenomena--the 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.
--Booklist

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 becoming 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.
--Kirkus