"Do yourself a favor and read this smart, tender book. The characters will haunt you with their longing and inspire you with their sweet, caustic wit. Dylan Hicks knows his music and his prose is a song in itself."--Sam Lipsyte "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, 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' debut novel captures the music and mood of the fading embers of America's boomer counterculture. Dylan Hicks is a songwriter, musician, and writer. His work has appeared in The Village Voice, The New York Times, Star Tribune, City Pages, and Rain Taxi, and he has released three CDs under his own name. A fourth, Sings Bolling Greene, 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.

»The Boarded Window« is a short story by Ambrose Bierce, originally published in 1891. AMBROSE BIERCE [1842-1914] was an American author, journalist, and war veteran. He was one of the most influential journalists in the United States in the late 19th century and alongside his success as a horror writer he was hailed as a pioneer of realism. Among his most famous works are The Devil's Dictionary and the short story »An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge.«

"In Mister Alexander's neighborhood, it gets very dark very early." - Steve DuBois www.stevedubois.net "The nine stories in Michael Alexander's creepy collection, Boarded Windows, Dead Leaves, explore the creepier side of humanity. The tone is set by 'A Profound Impact' and doesn't let up. He takes on some of the standard horror tropes but also explores new grounds, all the while staying faithful to the theme that there are some very scary things out there, and you'd better be afraid." - Vincent Moore Professor of English & Humanities, Tiffin University Author of Emily Dickinson, Ninja Assassin "In Boarded Windows, Dead Leaves, Michael Jess Alexander takes the reader on a thrill-ride through his haunted imagination. Be sure to hold on tight! There are plenty of twists and turns you won't see coming until it is too late. By the time you manage to avert your gaze, the seeds of nightmare will have already been planted." - Lamont A. Turner "It depends on what you fear more, visiting the dead or being visited by the dead, which of these "nine macabre tales" you will find the most macabre. Will you be haunted more by living (and dying) the last moment of a laser-sliced brain, or by the returning soul able to possess many bodies at once, or by the experience of being eaten alive? Regardless of which one digs deepest into your anxieties, you won't soon forget any of the stories in Michael Jess Alexander's Boarded Windows, Dead Leaves." - H. L. Hix Author of Demonstrategy --- From cultish rituals to cosmic horror, Michael Jess Alexander's collection of horror fiction will leave you disquieted and unsettled. In "Chatterbox," a college professor is haunted by the spirit of a former student. "A Profound Impact" tells the story of a lost group of people who finally find a place they belong. In "Space For Amateurs," a science experiment goes horribly awry. These tales and six others await you in this haunting volume of horror fiction.

Why, even in the same high-crime neighborhoods, do robbery, drug dealing, and assault occur much more frequently on some blocks than on others? One popular theory is that a weak sense of community among neighbors can create conditions more hospitable for criminals, and another proposes that neighborhood disorder—such as broken windows and boarded-up buildings—makes crime more likely. But in his innovative new study, Peter K. B. St. Jean argues that we cannot fully understand the impact of these factors without considering that, because urban space is unevenly developed, different kinds of crimes occur most often in locations that offer their perpetrators specific advantages. Drawing on Chicago Police Department statistics and extensive interviews with both law-abiding citizens and criminals in one of the city’s highest-crime areas, St. Jean demonstrates that drug dealers and robbers, for example, are primarily attracted to locations with businesses like liquor stores, fast food restaurants, and check-cashing outlets. By accounting for these important factors of spatial positioning, he expands upon previous research to provide the most comprehensive explanation available of why crime occurs where it does.

In the first half of 2020, Americans endured the COVID_19 Crisis, quarantine, massive loss of lives and historic unemployment. Then the death of George Floyd, yet another unarmed black man, dead at the hands of police became too much for the citizens to bear. The people rioted across the country, property was looted and destroyed. Soon store owners would board up their looted or vulnerability businesses. Afterward, the local artist used those blank wooden boards as canvases to express themselves; here's what they had to say...

Praise for Dylan Hicks: "Hicks is a terrific writer who can craft a simile with the best of them." —Kirkus Reviews "The joy in Hicks' debut arises less from plot than from the writing itself: nuanced, ingenious, perceptive, funny." —The Star Tribune "Do yourself a favor and read this smart, tender book. The characters will haunt you with their longing, and inspire you with their sweet, caustic wit." —Sam Lipsyte Archer is a semi-celebrated novelist and sex-toy heir. His best friend, John, is as earnest as Archer is feckless. John’s girlfriend, Sara, envies Archer’s writing career. And Sara’s roommate, Lucas, wishes he’d never lost his girlfriend to the man. Money, friendship, and resentment unspool in the conversations we have as we’re coming of age and coming to grips. 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, and elsewhere. He lives in Minneapolis with his wife, Nina Hale, and their son, Jackson.

Four writers gather stories from the people of St. Paul and weave them into this beautiful collection.