SONGS ONLY YOU KNOW

Songs Only You Know is a
beautiful, devastating exploration of family, friends, and one young man's
musical dream.

Songs Only You Know plunges us into the Detroit hardcore punk scene with eighteenyearold Sean and spans a dark decade during which his father succumbs to crack addiction, his younger sister spirals into a fatal depression, and his sense of home crumbles. Sean's salvation is music, and the many eccentrics and outsiders he befriends as frontman of a band once referred to by Spin Magazine as "an artcore mindfuck." Sean's prose whips from mordantly funny to searingly honest while offering an unflinching look at a family in crisis, lowrent music subculture, and the hardearned identity of its author. A story of young manhood that deserves a place alongside Tobias Wolff's In Pharaoh's Army and Nick Flynn's Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, Songs Only You Know is a beautiful, devastating exploration of family, friends, and one young man's musical dream. It marks the arrival of a fiercely original literary voice. Sean Hoen was raised in Dearborn, Michigan and was formerly a front man of the Detroitbased bands Leaving Rouge and The Holy Fire. He formed his first band, Thoughts of Ionesco at age 17, which Spin Magazine called "an artcore mindfuck" in 1998. He is a recent graduate of Columbia University's MFA program, where he also taught creative writing. His first published story, "Label," won the 2011 BOMB Magazine Fiction Free Press Contest. He received an honorable mention in the 2011 Glimmer Train Open Fiction Contest and was runner up in the American Literary Review 2011 Fiction contest. Sean now lives in Brooklyn, NY where he continues to write and play music.