Shader: 99 Notes on Car Washes, Making Out in Church, Grief, and Other Unlearnable Subjects

Literary Nonfiction. In 2013, Daniel Nester's estranged father died penniless and alone in a small apartment in Tucson. The news brings back a flood of memories about Mike Nester, an enigmatic truck driver with a genius IQ, who influences Daniel's worldview with conspiracy theories, philosophy books, and something called The Nester Curse. Told in short chapters, SHADER: 99 NOTES ON CAR WASHES, MAKING OUT IN CHURCH, GRIEF, AND OTHER UNLEARNABLE SUBJECTS is a semi-comic coming-of-age story of a music- obsessed Catholic boy who searches for a new identity outside of Maple Shade, N.J., a blue-collar town straight out of a Bruce Springsteen song and where Martin Luther King, Jr. was once thrown out of a bar at gunpoint. The town's rough-and- tumble inhabitants, called Shaders, don't suffer record nerds like Daniel gladly, and eventually punk rock and poetry saves his life. A story of redemption and working through grief, SHADER tells the story of what it means to leave a place that never leaves you. Nester takes us on the ride of his life, and we uncover pieces of ourselves along the way...an engaging read.--Billy Squier, multi- platinum selling singer/songwriter My God! What would we do without Daniel Nester's irreverence, obsessions and bizarre and wonderful charm. The book you hold in your hands is fantastic.--Darcey Steinke, author of Sister Golden Hair and Easter Everywhere SHADER is that rare book that manages to be hilarious, poetic, insightful, and compulsively readable all at the same time. Daniel Nester has the gifts to turn a time, a town, into both a dream and a place that feels like home, with some of the most potent characters I can think of in recent literature. I couldn't put it down.--Paul Lisicky, author of The Narrow Door and Famous Builder

About the Author :
Daniel Nester is the author of How to Be Inappropriate, described as a deeply funny collection of booger-flecked nonfiction in Time Out New York. Nester's first two books, God Save My Queen: A Tribute and God Save My Queen II: The Show Must Go On, are collections on his obsession with the rock band Queen. A third, The History of My World Tonight (BlazeVOX, 2006), is a collection of pretty good poems. He is also editor of The Incredible Sestina Anthology. His writing has appeared in such places as The New York Times, The Morning News, Salon, The Daily Beast, The Rumpus, McSweeney's Internet Tendency, and the Poetry Foundation website, and anthologized in such collections as Lost and Found, The Best American Poetry, The Best Creative Nonfiction, Third Rail: The Poetry of Rock and Roll, and Now Write! Nonfiction. He is the former editor of the online journals Unpleasant Event Schedule and La Petite Zine and worked as Assistant Web Editor for Sestinas for McSweeney's Internet Tendency. Currently, he is an associate professor of English at The College of Saint Rose in Albany, N.Y., where he teaches writing. He lives in upstate New York with his wife and two daughters.