Barnes & Noble: SONGS ONLY YOU KNOW by Sean Madigan Hoen is a Discover Great New Writers pick

NEW YORK - April 2, 2014 - PRLog -- Barnes and Noble Booksellers has chosen Brooklyn-based author Sean Madigan Hoen’s memoir SONGS ONLY YOU KNOW, centered on his troubled, musical youth in Detroit, as a Discover Great New Writers pick for summer 2014. The program, which has been “discovering extraordinary literary talents” for over 100 years, has launched books such as Cheryl Strayed’s Wild, Anthony Marra’s Constellation of Vital Phenomena, and Adam Sternbergh’s Shovel Ready.

Songs Only You Know is Hoen’s debut and will be released on April 15, 2014. It follows Hoen through a traumatic decade in Detroit in the 1990s when he was in a noisecore punk band, Thoughts of Ionesco, once referred to as “the ultimate realization of pain-through-sound” by Alternative Press magazine. But while the band was taking off, Hoen’s family was falling apart, shattered by his father’s addiction to crack cocaine. His sister spirals into a devastating depression, and Hoen finds himself torn between escapism and success in his music, and duty to his family.

Of the book, #1 NYT Bestseller and author of Eat, Pray, Love Elizabeth Gilbert says: “Sean Madigan Hoen is not merely an immensely gifted writer, but also a seeker—of redemption, of clarity, of hard family history. There are moments of Songs Only You Know that seem almost too painful to bear—but only almost. What carries the reader through is both the naked beauty of the prose and the deep human certainty that it is always better to face the truth than to flinch away from it. No flinching here. I admired every page of it.”

Songs Only You Know has garnered other pre-publication attention, including endorsements from National Book Critics Circle award-winner Darin Strauss, National Book Award-winner Jaimy Gordon, Sam Lipsyte, Bill Clegg, Kyle Minor, Rivka Galchen, Stephen O’Connor.

Hoen’s launch event, moderated by Darin Strauss, will be held at the POWERHOUSE Arena in DUMBO, Brooklyn, on April 15^th at 7pm.