Congratulations to Brendan Gillen and Vine Leaves Press on the release of Static, "a High Fidelity for our millennium."
★★★★★ “Reverberates with the drumbeat of why we make art.” ~Will Musgrove, author of Asphalt Dreaming
Static
NEW RELEASE: July 16, 2024Genre: Literary Fiction
Paperback: $17.99
Ebook: From $5.99
For Paul, stealing is easy. When he's hungry, he strolls into a bodega and steals lunch. When rent’s due, he steals records and flips them for cash. As a lonely kid growing up in Ohio’s Rust Belt, stealing was the only way he could score the hip hop records and production equipment that fueled his musical dreams.
Now he’s in NYC fighting to keep his once-ascendant band alive and his life from falling apart. His bank account is flatlining. The love of his life has broken his heart. Bunky, his bandmate, is ditching him for Eloise, a soulful vagabond with an intoxicating voice. When financial trouble forces his parents from their lifelong home, Paul ramps up his stealing to save his family from collapse. And in a fever of creativity, he begins to steal from the voices in his life to make the music he’s sure will save his soul.
Set against the modern music industry, where a single social post can change your destiny, Static is alive to the weight of familial expectations, the pursuit of our deepest hopes and dreams, and the struggle to make meaningful connections in the anxiety of the digital age.
Praise for Static
★★★★★ “Static is a deep dive into the dark web of the American way of success and failure, and the unforgiving scream of the music of chance.” ~Salar Abdoh, author of A Nearby Country Called Love
★★★★★ “Funny, witty, and energetic... will hook you like a beautiful, catchy song that you’ll be humming for days.” ~Will Musgrove, author of Asphalt Dreaming
★★★★★ “A heartfelt, moving debut about the downtown New York music scene, brimming with wasted talent, floundering ambition, broken hearts, and betrayals—and wonderfully redeemed by the possibility of second chances.” ~Elizabeth Gaffney, author of Metropolis and When the World was Young
★★★★★ “Music pops out of every page in multi-sensory detail - the warm crackle of a needle on vinyl, the sweat of a crowd, the vibration of strings, the digitized reanimation of a sample, and the cacophonous ambient symphony of New York City.” ~Will Hagle, author of Madvillain's Madvillainy
★★★★★ “A generation ago, Nick Hornby showed us that a record store can be the perfect backdrop for a novel about the twisted path to growing up. So why haven’t more people paid attention since then? Luckily, Brendan Gillen has, and the result is Static, a High Fidelity for our millennium.” ~Dan LeRoy, author of Dancing to the Drum Machine
About the Author
Brendan Gillen is an Emmy-winning writer living in Brooklyn. His fiction has twice been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, and his debut chapbook, I've Given This a Lot of Thought, was published in 2022. As a partner and writer/director at Boomshot, Brendan has developed content for ESPN, FanDuel, Condé Nast, Fox Sports, BBC, the U.S. Open, Resy, Anheuser-Busch, and others. His work has received attention in the New York Times, Mashable, the Washington Post, USA Today’s “For the Win,” SportsIllustrated.com, the Huffington Post and People.com, among others. He earned a Sports Emmy for his work on the campaign for the 2014 FIFA World Cup on ESPN. Learn more at bgillen.com.
About the Publisher
Vine Leaves Press likes to blur the line between commercial and experimental works. They publish book-length vignette collections, writing reference books, short story collections, memoir/autobiography, and character-driven novels with a literary bent. Subscribe to the Vine Leaves Press newsletter to receive FREE advanced review copies of upcoming new releases, news about their authors and subscribers, and/or to read the monthly opinion column, SPILL IT! or a daily dose of 50-word stories. Learn more at VineLeavesPress.com.