Meet Francis Fellini Phaeline, a self-described fatalist who is paid a dollar a word to write a full-length story about his best buddy Bucky Bertolli, "the idiot poet from Pennsylvania." In a novel that has been described as "a hilarious post-modern romp, " francis and Bucky, armed with copious amounts of anti-establishment millenial angst, set out "to spread their viral gene sequence" in as many time zones as possible. It's only when they pass the existentially tragic age of thirty that they realize their circuitous path of social destruction has always been in orbit around the inscrutable, indescribable X -Marude X. "Marude X is one of the most engaging novels I've read in years." -Chuck Rosenthal.