Through The Windshield is the terrific first novel by Michael DeCapite, first released from Sparkle Street Books of San Francisco. Circulated in manuscript and widely excerpted in literary magazines, the novel became a word-of-mouth classic in the late '80s and early '90s. This is the first Red Giant edition.

Through the Windshield

Literature & Fiction

DeCapite, Mike

Contemporary

Red Giant Books

Product Description 
Nick Hornby meets Patti Smith, Mean Streets meets A Visit From the Goon Squad in this quintessential New York City story about two people who knew each other in the downtown music scene in the 1980s, meet again in the present day, and fall in love.\nMike knew June in New York’s downtown music scene in the eighties. Back then, he thought she was “the living night—all the glamour and potential of a New York night when you’re 25.” Now he’s twice divorced and happy to be alone—so happy he’s writing a book about it. Then he meets June again. “And here she was with a raincoat over the back of the chair talking about getting a divorce and saying she’s done with relationships. Her ice-calm eyes are the same, the same her glory of curls.”\nJacket Weather 
is about awakening to love—dizzying, all-consuming, worldview-shaking love—when it’s least expected. It's also about remaining alert to today's pleasures—exploring the city, observing the seasons, listening to the guys at the gym—while time is slipping away. Told in fragments of narrative, reveries, recipes, bits of conversation and snatches of weather, the book collapses a decade in Mike and June’s life and shifts a reader to a glowing nostalgia for the present. 
 Review 
" 
Jacket Weather is a triumph." —Shawn Mishak, 
Cleveland Scene\n"[DeCapite] is that rare wordsmith who trades heavily in autobiographical reflections but refuses to succumb to the narcissistic pitfalls of capital-M memoirs . . . [ 
Jacket Weather] describes a very NYC courtship, but one that will charm people who get hives at the mention of Woody Allen movies." —Jordan Mamone, 
Please Kill Me\n" 
Jacket Weather . . . captured, like nothing else I’ve read, how it is to talk and talk with someone you love at a certain age in your life in New York City, the city that never stops talking . . . DeCapite is a skilled mimic and chronicler of the sheer poetry of human conversation and you can hear the dialogue, much of which made me laugh out loud." — 
Ordinary Times\n"Effortlessly drifting through the years and narrative forms, this is almost a sepia-tinted look back at a man’s life and a past New York. DeCapite is a phenomenally skilled writer . . . The dialogue is rich, believable, and often very funny, and this is a wonderfully unusual meditation on nostalgia and love." — 
Booklist\n"Spare and lyrical . . . DeCapite has a poet’s eye for the city’s majestic details, and illustrates how his characters come to see the same things differently over the years . . . A worthwhile meditation." — 
Publishers Weekly\n"So very real . . . A sad but sweet song about the uncertainty of middle age and how funny it is when time slips away." — 
Kirkus Reviews\n" 
Jacket Weather is a beautiful, evocative account of a late-in-life love sprung into being in early twenty-first-century Manhattan, characters tossed forth from the aftermath of the punk rock seventies. Protagonist Mike spins cryptic, poetic observations of his daily life, strikes random and true chords, pen as Telecaster. His plaintive adoration of June, the love of his life, is painted with enduring mystery and great respect. I loved this book.” —Lee Ranaldo, Sonic Youth, author of 
Road Movies and 
jrnls80s\n"In this roman à clef—minus the clef—I can clearly hear the music of the NYC streets; feel the L train as it hums; and can smell something cookin'—a modern Moveable Feast." —Clinton Heylin, author of 
The Double Life of Bob Dylan and 
From the Velvets to the Voidoids: The Birth of American Punk Rock\n"Mike DeCapite has an eye for deep beauty in the mundane. He writes prose that makes poetry of just walking down the street. What he observes injects a charged current into life’s moments between. Reading 
Jacket Weather is like listening to the world reveal its secrets." —Robert Gordon, author of 
It Came from Memphis and 
Respect Yourself: Stax Records and the Soul Explosion\n"Mike DeCapite’s books all feel like movies to me. The characters, and the rooms

Jacket Weather

Dramas & Plays

Soft Skull

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