Publisher's Synopsis
Incidental Contact is outsider musician/Pushcart Prize winning author Jim White's long awaited debut novel. Part memoir, part urban fable, the quixotic narrative unspools around a cluster of truly baffling events that befall White during a severe mental health spiral, episodes which lead to him being "discovered" by Talking Heads frontman David Byrne. Chronicling a harrowing ten year stretch mostly spent disintegrating behind the wheel of a New York City taxi cab, White navigates a daisy chain of gritty intersections between the real and surreal, encountering a dizzying array of agents of synchronicity: drug lords, con men, deviant proctologists, errant pigs, doomed lovers, psychics and psychos, and ultimately a string of true cultural luminaries, each bearing enigmatic messages for White from the Great Beyond. Above all Incidental Contact is a love letter to the fans of White's Wrong-Eyed Jesus oeuvre-the marginalized seekers among us: the freaks, the outsiders, the lost souls-anyone who, as White points out in his iconic song Static on the Radio, "thinks less of what is written than what's wrote between the lines. "
