Publication Party and Reading

Jacket Weather is a tender love story that blossoms like a rose in the concrete of a city always on the verge. DeCapite’s effortless prose stirs echoes of certain New York School poets, of ‘cold rosy dawn,’ night streets illuminated by great bars and the music streaming out of them—the endless possibilities of a place where, despite persistent evidence to the contrary, ‘love is the heart of everything’. —Max Blagg, author of Slow Dazzle and Loud Money

Howl! Arts is pleased to present an afternoon with friend and colleague, writer Mike DeCapite, in honor of his highly praised first novel, Jacket Weather published by Soft Skull Press.

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.

Mike 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.”

Jacket 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.

Poetic and compulsively readable, Jacket Weather invents a new genre—call it lyrical realism. Mike DeCapite casts a cool but affectionate eye on New York in the 2010s, as it lives on despite having become a replica of itself. Like Virginie Despentes’s Vernon Subutex, Jacket Weather traces the lives of those who’ve stayed on after the party. It’s a love story improbably set at the beginning of late middle age, and it’s also a story of cities, survival, adaptation, desire, and a celebration of the small pleasures we invent and discover to offset unavoidable loss. —Chris Kraus, author of After Kathy Acker and Summer of Hate

Under the banner of Sparkle Street Books, Mike DeCapite has published the novel Through the Windshield, the chapbook Creamsicle Blue, and the short-prose collection Radiant Fog. Cuz Editions published his story Sitting Pretty, later anthologized in The Italian American Reader. DeCapite grew up in Cleveland, lived in London and San Francisco, and has spent most of his creative life in New York City, where he now resides.

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. —Lee Ranaldo, Sonic Youth, author of Road Movies and JNRLS80s