Boarded Windows

A bravura debut novel hailed as “a continually hilarious, hopes-dashed account of an indelible American character: the con man” (Greil Marcus). 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, disru