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.