Through the Windshield

by Mike DeCapite, Michael DeCapite

Overview

"A novel of undeniable and unusual merit, DeCapite's achievement is so extraordinary that a belated appreciation must be penned in the hope it will cause at least one other person to pick up this book. . . . [A] down-at-the-heels, absorbing masterpiece. . . ."
----Jocko Weyland, Rain Taxi, Spring 2008

"One of the better American novels published in the last several years . . ."
----Harvey Pekar, The Austin Chronicle, November 19, 1999

Read it for its humor. Read it for its pain. Or read it for its language, a hard-boiled version of beat expansiveness. One thing's certain: with all the different and sometimes contradictory things that this book accomplishes, you'll never read anything else like it.
----Frank Green, The Cleveland Free Times, December 16, 1998

Product Details

BN ID:	2940148389156
Publisher:	Sparkle Street Books
Publication date:	09/14/2013
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	457
File size:	754 KB

About the Author

Through the Windshield was begun on an Olympia Traveller-model typewriter in an attic room with old-lady pink floral wallpaper and one big window above a quiet street in London in 1985 and completed on a different portable Olympia in a smoky, disordered kitchen with a backyard view in Brooklyn five years later. The first draft of it, anyway. Excerpts were published first in three issues of CUZ magazine in the late eighties, but the book went unpublished until DeCapite published it himself with his Sparkle Street Books in 1998. DeCapite’s second novel, Ruined for Life!, was begun on a desk-model Olympia in a laundry room in San Francisco in 1994 and completed on a Sony laptop a dozen years later, give or take, back in Brooklyn. Excerpts from it have appeared in 3:AM Magazine and Sensitive Skin. DeCapite’s other published work includes the chapbooks Sitting Pretty (CUZ Editions, 1999) and Creamsicle Blue (Sparkle Street, 2012) and the prose collection Radiant Fog (Sparkle Street, 2013). DeCapite lives in New York.

Editorial Reviews

This is one of those rare books of girth and gravitas that under the right circumstances can be read in two days straight, a journey into someone's mind that engages the reader so completely it lives up to the cliché of the "page turner" — not because it's mindless, but because it demands a close reading that brings on a thoroughly enjoyable takeover of the thoughts and senses.

Rain Taxi Review of Books - Jocko Weyland

Michael DeCapite’s renditions of rollicking riffs from his unpublished novel Through The Windshield highlighted many a poetry reading on the Lower East Side of Manhattan and south side of Cleveland in the late 1980s. And it wasn’t long before the book developed a small, enthusiastic cadre of admirers.

Cleveland Free Times - Frank Green

That's the Cleveland I know and love.

The Austin Chronicle - Harvey Pekar