Visit me at
www.kimpowersbooks.com
First, some questions:
Was Boo Radley a real person?
Why didn't Harper Lee ever write another book, after TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD?
What did she see in Kansas, when she was with Truman Capote writing IN COLD BLOOD, that changed her life forever?
Did the ghosts of the murdered Clutters ever visit the very people who brought them back to life?
What made Truman Capote pick up the phone, in the final year of his life, and make one last call to his childhood best friend, now his almost bitter enemy? What does he say that sends her to a cemetery in the middle of the night -- where her family -- and their childhood secrets --are buried?
If those questions intrigue you, then you'll want to read my new novel, CAPOTE IN KANSAS. It's a sort of "fantasia" about two of our greatest and most mysterious writers, and the inescapable memories that bind them together. But more than just a book about Capote and Lee, it's about all our childhoods: when you played barefoot outside, late into the night, or pretended there was a haunted house in the neighborhood, and didn't understand the grown-up world of adults and death -- or understood it all too well.
Entertainment Weekly says: "Powers astutely summons the intense sorrow behind a life-long friendship gone awry."
Publishers Weekly calls it "welcome", "offbeat" and intriguing."
The Advocate calls it "dark and captivating."
Pulitzer Prize winner Oscar Hijuelos writes: “I thought I knew the story of Truman Capote and Harper Lee. I was wrong. Kim Powers brilliantly brings their strange relationship alive in a way a standard-issue biography never could. Weaving together fact, speculation and fantasy, he creates a sort of emotional biography that will haunt you long after the last page...just as the ghosts of the slain Clutters must have haunted them.”
Maybe best of all, Library Journal, in a starred review, has this to say:
"In his exceptional first novel, Emmy and Peabody Award winner Powers presents us with Truman Capote in the last year of his life. Addled by drugs and alcohol and despairing the wreck his shining life has become, he is plagued by the ghosts of the people whose deaths he chronicled in his greatest book, In Cold Blood. The now-old Harper Lee, or Nelle as she calls herself, is the only one who has a shot at understanding Truman—his childhood friend, she served as companion and researcher on the trip to Kansas that produced In Cold Blood. But Nelle has her own ghosts to exorcise having to do with why she never wrote a second book. In Kansas, Powers speculates, Truman exposed Nelle to her own sexuality, which she continues to suppress. And at his famous 1966 Black and White Ball, green with envy over Nelle's having won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, Truman spreads the rumor that it was he who wrote To Kill a Mockingbird, not she. Powers, whose 2006 memoir, The History of Swimming, was a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers pick, succeeds brilliantly in blending fact and fiction to produce a sensitive portrait of two lost souls. Heartily recommended for public collections."—David Keymer, Modesto, CA
(P.S. I love you David Keymer, whoever you are!)
But if you REALLY want to know all about me, you'll read my first book, the memoir THE HISTORY OF SWIMMING, now out in paperback. Not for the faint of heart, or those afraid of too much drinking, suicide attempts, psych wards, dysfunctional families, mothers who may or may not have killed themselves, swimming pools, boys in speedos, the Hill Country of Texas, or being your brother's keeper.
