Excerpt from Tuesday Nights in 1980 by Molly Prentiss, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

It was true, he knew, that his brain—a brain in which a word was transformed into a color, where an image was manufactured into a bodily sensation, where applesauce tasted like sadness and winter was the color blue—was the reason he was on any front page of anything, on anyone's lips, at any party like this one. His synesthesia, as they had finally diagnosed it when he was sixteen—too old for it to have not fucked up his childhood—had unlocked a key to a world of art he would never have been invited into otherwise. But the way Winona had said it gave him pause, and through his happy mood he felt the Running List of Worries gather enough speed to hop the fence onto the Existential Track, where the profoundest worries—worries that came all the way from the past—ran a relay of sorts, passing the baton through the race of James's life, landing him, of all places, here.

Excerpted from Tuesday Nights in 1980 by Molly Prentiss. Copyright © 2016 by Molly Prentiss. Excerpted by permission of Gallery Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.