Saturday 16 September 2017, 3pm: King Grossman’s recent novel, Letters to Alice, was a finalist for the Indie Excellence Book Awards and and was the winner of the 2017 Independent Press Awards. We are excited to welcome Grossman to Old Capitol Books to sign copies of his new book and talk to peninsula book lovers.
About the novel:
This lyrically written novel gives you Frazier Pickett III, the “slumbering man.” He has taken up looking over the top of fake reading glasses. His dirty little secret: He’s desperately myopic, actually preferring not to clearly see what’s going on.
Having penned three unpublished manuscripts, the slumbering man hasn’t written anything in over four years, nor has he been to a street protest to push back against endless warring, climate change, economic injustice, or just name any number of movements of which he used to be on the front lines. Margaret, his wife, tunes him out as much over his worsening condition as her angst in not being able to find the courage to pen the novel she dreams of writing. In need of muses, while Margaret distantly awaits him to be hers, the slumbering man falls for the beautiful French contemporary artist Anastasie Moreau.
Letters to Alice also tells the story of Katya Ivashov, Boris Pasternak’s young writing protégé, who inspires Pasternak to get his manuscript for Doctor Zhivago smuggled out of Russia for publication in the West, risking their lives. What does this have to do with ending Frazier’s slumber or perpetuating it and, what’s more, who is Alice?
About King Grossman
King Grossman is an award winning novelist, poet, and writer of short prose. Letters To Alice, his current novel, received The Independent Press Award as the 2017 Distinguished Favorite in Visionary Fiction, and was a Finalist for Literary Fiction in the 2017 National Indie Excellence Awards. His work has recently appeared in The Round, Licking River Review, Crack the Spine, Caveat Lector, Forge, Tiger’s Eye, DMQ Review, Diverse Voices Quarterly, Qwerty, Burningword, and Ignatian. All royalties from King’s books are contributed to Occupy the Word Foundation, a nonprofit organization King founded to offer writers residencies and publishing opportunities to fresh, radical writers of fiction and poetry. King is the host of Artivism—which explores the intersection of writers and artists with social justice activism—on Your Town television program broadcast throughout the Monterey Peninsula, California area. A longtime fugitive from the worlds of Wall Street and Capitol Hill, these days he also regularly participates in nonviolent public actions to address climate change, economic injustice, institutionalized racism, inhumane immigration policy, oppressive violence and militarism. He lives in Carmel-by-the-Sea, California with his wife, Lisa, dog, Bogart, and sun conure parrot, Sunny.
Old Capitol Books 