The Last Magazine

Michael Hastings was a contributing editor to Rolling Stone and a correspondent at large for BuzzFeed. Before that he worked for Newsweek , where he rose to prominence covering the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. He was the recipient of the 2010 George Polk Award for his Rolling Stone magazine story The Runaway General . Hastings was the author of three books, I Lost My Love in Baghdad, Panic 2012, The Operators , and The Last Magazine . He died in 2013, and was posthumously honored with the Norman Mailer Award for Emerging Journalist.

The year is 2002. Weekly newsmagazines dominate the political agenda in New York and Washington. A young journalist named Michael M. Hastings is a twenty-two- year-old intern at The Magazine , wet behind the ears, the only one in the office who's actually read his coworker's books. He will stop at nothing to turn his internship into a full-time position, and he's figured out just whom to impress: Nishant Patel, the international editor, and Sanders Berman, managing editor, both vying for the job of editor in chief. While Berman and Nishant try to one-up each other pontificating on cable news, A. E. Peoria-the one reporter seemingly doing any work-is having a career crisis. He's just returned from Chad, where, instead of the genocide, he was told by his editors to focus on mobile phone outsourcing, which they think is more relevant. And then, suddenly, the United States invades Iraq-and all hell breaks loose. As Hastings loses his naïveté about the journalism game, he must choose where his loyalties lie-with the men at The Magazine who can advance his career or with his friend in the field who is reporting the truth.
The Last Magazine is the debut novel from Michael Hastings, discovered in his files after his untimely death in June 2013. Informed by his own journalistic experiences, it is wickedly funny, sharp, and fast-paced: a great book about print journalism's last glory days, and a compelling first novel from one of America's most treasured reporters.