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Almost Famous meets Portnoy’s Complaint: A record store clerk in search of his origins confronts his con-man father figure.
Wade Salem is a charismatic aesthete, drug dealer, and journeyman country musician. He’s also a complicated father figure to this novel’s narrator, whose cloudy childhood becomes both clearer and more confusing through Wade’s stories, jokes, and lectures. Through the eyes of a keenly observant, underemployed record collector, Wade emerges as a sly, disruptive force, at once seductive and maddening.
Shifting between flashbacks from the seventies and nineties, Boarded Windows is a postmodern orphan story that explores the fallibility of memory and the weight of our social and cultural inheritance. Stylistically layered and searchingly lonesome, Dylan Hicks’s debut novel captures the music and mood of the fading embers of America’s boomer counterculture.
Wade Salem is a charismatic aesthete, drug dealer, and journeyman country musician. He’s also a complicated father figure to this novel’s narrator, whose cloudy childhood becomes both clearer and more confusing through Wade’s stories, jokes, and lectures. Through the eyes of a keenly observant, underemployed record collector, Wade emerges as a sly, disruptive force, at once seductive and maddening.
Shifting between flashbacks from the seventies and nineties, Boarded Windows is a postmodern orphan story that explores the fallibility of memory and the weight of our social and cultural inheritance. Stylistically layered and searchingly lonesome, Dylan Hicks’s debut novel captures the music and mood of the fading embers of America’s boomer counterculture.
Price: $16.00
Pages: 240
Publisher: Coffee House Press
Imprint: Coffee House Press
Publication Date:
24 April 2012
Trim Size: 8.25 X 5.50 in
ISBN: 9781566892971
Format: Paperback
“This book is not merely a postmodern exercise in notions of truth, nor is it merely funny and intelligent; it is fundamentally a sincere and heartbreaking tale of loneliness, a man who comes to realize that the windows in his life, home, and family are inherently boarded up.” —The Brooklyn Rail
“Pop-music references pepper the pages of Hicks’s ambitious debut about the prickly relationship between a father and son. . . . with polished prose that is witty and smart.” —Booklist
“The sirens of unavoidable heartbreak sound throughout this book, not quite drowned out by all the music and erudite chatter, and you can’t help but want to stick around to watch the storm roll in.” —MPR’s The Current
“The joy in Hicks’s debut arises less from plot than from the writing itself: nuanced, ingenious, perceptive, funny.” —The Star Tribune
”Reading Hicks's debut novel is not so much like reading a novel as it is like peering into someone else’s soul. . . . It’s more an exploration of memory than it is of relationship—with dizzying forays into country music, jazz, erotica and Plato.” —The Examiner
“Boarded Windows is a stellar work of fiction, not to mention a stellar work on.” —Los Angeles Review of Books
“A shrewd and soulful novel.” —Dana Spiotta
“[Hicks has] given light to the shuttered and boarded parts of life.” —Sam Lipsyte
“It’s one thing to find your own voice, it’s another to create your own language, and I think that’s what Dylan does.” —Greil Marcus
“A deeply moving book that announces a major talent in American fiction.” —Samantha Gillison
“Pop-music references pepper the pages of Hicks’s ambitious debut about the prickly relationship between a father and son. . . . with polished prose that is witty and smart.” —Booklist
“The sirens of unavoidable heartbreak sound throughout this book, not quite drowned out by all the music and erudite chatter, and you can’t help but want to stick around to watch the storm roll in.” —MPR’s The Current
“The joy in Hicks’s debut arises less from plot than from the writing itself: nuanced, ingenious, perceptive, funny.” —The Star Tribune
”Reading Hicks's debut novel is not so much like reading a novel as it is like peering into someone else’s soul. . . . It’s more an exploration of memory than it is of relationship—with dizzying forays into country music, jazz, erotica and Plato.” —The Examiner
“Boarded Windows is a stellar work of fiction, not to mention a stellar work on.” —Los Angeles Review of Books
“A shrewd and soulful novel.” —Dana Spiotta
“[Hicks has] given light to the shuttered and boarded parts of life.” —Sam Lipsyte
“It’s one thing to find your own voice, it’s another to create your own language, and I think that’s what Dylan does.” —Greil Marcus
“A deeply moving book that announces a major talent in American fiction.” —Samantha Gillison
Dylan Hicks is a writer and musician. His first novel, Boarded Windows, was published in 2012, along with a companion album of original songs, Dylan Hicks Sings Bolling Greene. His journalism has appeared in the Village Voice, the New York Times, the Guardian, the Star Tribune, City Pages, Rain Taxi, and elsewhere. He lives in Minneapolis with his wife, Nina Hale, and their son, Jackson.