Boarded Windows

Wade Salem is a charismatic aesthete, drug dealer, and journeyman country musician. He's also a complicated father 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 and under-employed 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 exploring the fallibility of memory and the weight of social and cultural inheritance. Stylistically layered and searchingly lonesome, Dylan Hicks' debut novel captures the music and mood of the fading embers of America's boomer counterculture.

"A continually hilarious, hopes-dashed account of an indelible American character: the con-man." –Greil Marcus

Dylan Hicks' writing has appeared in The Village Voice, The New York Times, Star Tribune, among other publications. He has also recorded three CDs under his own name; the fourth, Sings Bolling Greene, is a companion to this novel and will see release later in 2012.