Attention. Deficit. Disorder.

Attention. Deficit. Disorder.
Brad Listi

An impressive debut from a major new voice in American fiction.Days after his ex-girlfriend's suicide, Wayne flies to San Francisco for her funeral. When he learns that she aborted their child, Wayne embarks upon a search for meaning that takes him to unusual places and through some of the most influential events of the past ten years.His journey takes him up and down the East Coast on foot, then over to Cuba where he meets the fishing guide who inspired Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea, across the American West in an RV, ending up at the legendary Burning Man festival and an encounter with his soulmate, who turns out to be a six foot three giant of a woman in a purple cowboy hat.Brad Listi's novel is a dazzling exploration of love and death that just so happens to include some drugs, prostitutes, naked cycling, Mantovani and the ingredients for a Molotov cocktail. It is one of the most inventive and rewarding debuts in years.Attention. Deficit. Disorder. is the first great road novel of the 21st century.

Attention. Deficit. Disorder.

a novel

BRAD LISTI

To my parents, Frank and Peggy Listi

Absence makes the heart grow fonder.

—SEXTUS PROPERTIUS

Familiarity breeds contempt.

—SYRUS

A penny saved is a penny earned.

—BENJAMIN FRANKLIN

You can’t take it with you.

—MOSS HART AND GEORGE S. KAUFMAN

God must love the common man, he made so many of them.

—ABRAHAM LINCOLN

God must hate the common man, he made him so common.

—PHILIP WYLIE

I’ve steered clear of God. He was an incredible sadist.

—JOHN COLLIER

There is a superstition in avoiding superstition.

—FRANCIS BACON

There’s a sucker born every minute.

—P. T. BARNUM

Man is a social animal.

—BARUCH SPINOZA

Man is a political animal.

—ARISTOTLE

Man is the measure of all things.

—PROTAGORAS

Man is a blind, witless, low-brow anthropocentric clod who inflicts lesions upon the earth.

—IAN MCHARG

The main thing needed to make men happy is intelligence…and it can be fostered by education.

—BERTRAND RUSSELL

Learned men are the cisterns of knowledge, not the fountainheads.

—JAMES NORTHCOTE

All paid employments absorb and degrade the mind.

—ARISTOTLE

A perpetual holiday is a good working definition of hell.

—GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

If you want others to be happy, practice compassion. If you want to be happy, practice compassion.

—DALAI LAMA

Happiness? That’s nothing more than health and a poor memory.

—ALBERT SCHWEITZER

A humanitarian is always a hypocrite.

—GEORGE ORWELL

Sisyphus was basically a happy man.

—ALBERT CAMUS

Every actual state is corrupt. Good men must not obey laws too well.

—RALPH WALDO EMERSON