"A continually hilarious, hopes-dashed account of an indelible American character: the con man." 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, 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' debut novel captures the music and mood of the fading embers of America's boomer counterculture. is a songwriter, musician, and writer. His work has appeared in , , and , and he has released three CDs under his own name. A fourth, , is a soundtrack to this novel and will be released in May 2012. He lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota, with his wife Nina Hale and his son Jackson. This is his first novel.