Exit Wounds

Craig Amundsen’s world is in a state of flux-or, as he sees it, falling apart. Settling into his 50s, he feels less and less a part of his beloved San Francisco as the gay mecca gives way to tech bros and overpriced real estate. In the wake of a failed relationship and on the cusp of losing a job he loves, Craig jumps at the chance for jury duty, if only as a diversion from his own problems. The trial challenges his assumptions about the world around him, ultimately revealing a way toward embracing the inevitability of change-and even the possibility of love.

Exit Wounds examines the challenges of aging in a youth-centered culture with a playful sense of humor and a touch of romance.

“Funny, surprising, thoughtful and sad, DeSimone’s Exit Wounds is his love letter to San Francisco and a long overdue paean to the sustaining nature of gay male friendships. Craig’s story could be any one of our stories, and his experience as a juror illuminates our often bizarre justice system.” -Felice Picano, author of Ambidextrous: The Secret Lives of Children

“With Exit Wounds, Lewis DeSimone captures the shifting cultural landscape of contemporary San Francisco, generational rifts between gay men, the occasional cocktail-sipping barb that hits too close to home, and even the inherent racism of the criminal justice system, all with a deft and delicate hand.” -Jim Provenzano, author of Finding Tulsa and other novels

“With considerable wit and wisdom, Lewis DeSimone joins the ranks of Stephen McCauley, Andrew Holleran, Michael Cunningham, and Patrick Gale in vividly bringing to life gay characters coping with middle age in all its effronteries and affordances. Exit Wounds focuses on a tight-knit group of older gay friends in San Francisco who face change on every front: from aging bodies and waning desires to an assimilated younger gay generation (“even fags are straight now”) and a transforming cityscape where independent bookstores, like the one run by the narrator, don’t stand a chance. What survives is the love that binds these friends to each other and to a city that, despite its sometimes alienating transformations, remains alive, beckoning, fabulous: in a word, home. Writing with heart-felt sentiment but without sentimentality, DeSimone has crafted a glowing anthem to a place and to the possibilities of personal transformation amid inevitable change.” -Joseph Allen Boone, author of Furnace Creek and Conditions of Precarity

Lewis DeSimone is the author of the novels Chemistry, The Heart’s History, and Channeling Morgan. A longtime resident of San Francisco, he currently lives in Minneapolis.