Alec Wilkinson has been a writer at The New Yorker since 1980. Before that he was a policeman in Wellfleet, Massachusetts, and before that he was a rock and roll musician. He lives with his wife and son in New York City.

"Strange, wonderful, funny, weird, and totally engaging - and, like all of Wilkinson's work, simply beautiful" -- Susan Orlean, author of The Orchid Thief "It's not often that a person as inspiring and deeply outrageous as Poppa Neutrino is described by an author as immensely gifted as Wilkinson. Here is a life in the largest, most courageous sense of the word, a life that most of us - if we're honest - will feel a pang of regret at not having lived" -- Sebastian Junger, author of A Perfect Storm "A marvellous raft of a book in which we float along listening to an amiable Christian hobo and champion bullshitter expound on the inexplicable... A masterpiece" -- Garrison Keillor "[A] masterpiece of joy...[a] vivid, precise and jubilant testament, which will fill his readers with a great and unexpected happiness" -- Edward Hirsch "A hauntingly beautiful biography... an elegy to the strange wonder of the stories he [Neutrino] had to tell" Guardian