Western New York is undoubtedly the graveyard for many a Volkswagen bug, and over our forty years of bookselling Talking Leaves has sold hundreds of copies of John Muir’s essential repair manual, How to Keep Your VW Alive—many of them perhaps still on home book shelves across the region. Christopher Boucher has owned a bug or two himself, and he has named and modeled his clever and inventive first novel after the bestselling car self-help guidebook. He’ll be reading from and talking about How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive (Melville House) at Talking Leaves on Main Street on Thursday, March 8, at 7 pm. The event is free and open to the public. Purchase of a book, as an act of support for the author, publisher, and bookstore who make this event possible is highly encouraged.

If you think raising a kid in today’s world is hard, imagine how tough it would be if your child also happened to be a Volkswagen Beetle. And not a modern Beetle at that, but a 1960′s era Bug who tended to forget himself racing joyously and heedlessly down the highway, only to break down on the side of the road, puking oil. It’s enough to help a man cope with the recent death of his father, and focus on the dizzying, beautiful here and now of his fragile child.

Welcome to Christopher Boucher’s zany and brilliant literary universe, a place where metaphors shift beneath your feet, familiar words suddenly assume new meaning, tools talk, trees walk, and where time is actually money.

Modeled on the best-selling 1969 hippie handbook of the same title, this wildly inventive tale is both a stunning tour-de-force and a wise and charming consideration of the stuff of great fiction: death, love, loss, responsibility, and road trips.

With the hyperkinetic spark of George Saunders and the surrealist humanism of Aimee Bender, How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive marks the arrival of a fiction-making Mozart.

You can find novelist Emily St. John Mandel’s glowing review here:

http://www.themillions.com/2011/08/a-surrealists-guide-christopher-bouchers-how-to-keep-your-volkswagen-alive.html

Christopher Boucher received his MFA in Fiction from Syracuse University, where he studied with George Saunders and Junot Díaz. Before moving to Syracuse, he worked as the Arts and Entertainment Writer for The Daily Hampshire Gazette, and drove (when it started) a 1971 Volkswagen Beetle. He currently teaches writing and literature at Boston College, and is the managing editor of Post Road Magazine. In his free time, he plays banjo in a bluegrass band.