How the Sun Shines On Noise
by Matthew Deshe Cashion
Category: Fiction

Leo Gray works in a North Carolina toll booth, where he happily reads The World's Great Thinkers - Rousseau's Contract, Hegel's History, Marx's Manifesto; Heidegger, Nietzsche, the French poets, the Beats. So everything is dandy. Then his social worker girlfriend convinces him to turn upwardly mobile, and Leo lands a job writing for a newspaper on the coast of his home state of Georgia. Sounds great, right? But his two bosses are named, ahem, Big Dick and Little Dick Taylor. And his social worker girlfriend refuses to relocate with him, since she's taken on another amorous project, "a stroke victim in his sixties struggling to relearn the alphabet." In hopes of transforming yet another loser? Leo wonders. This first novel offers an unusual comic take of a man on the skids, a wildly sardonic ride that teeters on a great deal of darkness but manages to pull through in a fashion worthy of any smiling anti-hero who alternately fights himself and surrounding ring-a-ding complacency.