No Names

A novel by Greg Hewett April 8, 2025 • 5.5 x 8.25 • 352 pages • 9781566897259 Inspired by the iconic punk scene of the late '70s, No Names blurs the lines of affection and sexuality in a haunting tale of desire, hope, and loss. Mike and Pete were "no names," two working-class boys lost in the shuffle of their stratified town, brought together by their love of music. By 1978, their punk band was blazing across the underground scene. Now, in 1993, Mike is a hermit living alone on a dot of an island in the North Atlantic. When a mysterious letter from an unlikely fan named Isaac arrives, he's pulled right back into the pain he’s spent over a decade running from. Isaac longs for an escape from his lonely teenage life. A chance discovery of the No Names’ only album catapults him into an obsession with the godlike rockers and the tantalizing possibility of connection. As their stories collide, mistakes breed consequences that echo through the decades like the furious reverberations of a power chord. About the Author Greg Hewett is the author of five volumes of poetry, including Blindsight (Coffee House Press, 2016). The recipient of Fulbright fellowships to Denmark and Norway, he has also been a fellow at the Camargo Foundation in France, and is Professor of English at Carleton College. No Names is his first novel. He lives with his husband in Minneapolis. Praise for No Names A Goodreads Most Anticipated Literary Fiction of 2025 "A brutally poetic, endlessly captivating exploration of the transcendent power of music and all its impossible contradictions. With punchy, urgent writing, Hewett details the emotional and psychological complexity of fandom, obsession, failure, and the increasingly rare possibility of true connection." —Joe Meno, author of Book of Extraordinary Tragedies "With a poet’s expansive vision, Greg Hewett writes about all the ways that music crushes the distance between decades and individual lives, especially queer lives in search of orientation points. No Names charms with specificity and, in exchange, offers a life force." —Paul Lisicky, author of Song So Wild and Blue "Greg Hewett has created a magnificent, tender punk musician who has a little problem with violence, who is innocent in his experience; a boy/man whose music illuminates his passions, his passions fueling his music. The music and Hewett’s terrific hero live on after the final page." —Jane Hamilton, author of The Excellent Lombards Praise for Greg Hewett “[Hewett’s work] is full of wonderfully quiet musings on vision and memory, cogent observations about longing and loss.” —Lambda Literary Review “Through his plainspoken language which is, at times, conversational and, at times, confessional we are reminded of our own desires, those things for which we do still burn.” —Cleaver “Complex, yet simple, resisting efforts at reductionist understandings of what comprises a man.” —Signature “Hewett is a master architect of the poetic suite, and his house contains many mansions.” —D.A. Powell, author of Useless Landscape, Or A Guide for Boys “Hewett aims deeper, darker. The stakes are high for this poet and his gamble pays off stunningly.” —Kazim Ali, author of Northern Light “Always, [Hewett] seeks the pulse of the unsayable prime beneath words, the visible vision in ‘blindness deep and far.’” —Diane Seuss, author of Modern Poetry