Stoned out of his skull—this is how we find washed-up New York magazine writer Digby Maxwell when he is offered a last chance to redeem himself by becoming editor of a small philosophy magazine headquartered in a rural Vermont college town. Digby's assignment is to make the magazine relevant to contemporary culture. For starters, that requires several more tokes, very deep tokes.

A wildly witty novel in the tradition of J. P. Donleavy and Nick Hornby, Nothing Serious takes serious potshots at Manhattan pop culture and academic small-mindedness, sexual obsessions and political correctness, twenty-first century alienation and philosophers ranging from Aristotle to Sartre.