Capote in Kansas: A Ghost Story

by Kim Powers

Overview

From the author of the bestselling memoir, The History of Swimming, comes a novel about Truman Capote, Harper Lee, and the ghosts of the Clutters, the Kansas farm family murdered fifty years ago, in cold blood. Kim Powers imagines the truths Capote and Lee uncovered in Kansas and kept hidden for years; the rumors and revelations that followed the success of To Kill a Mockingbird, which estranged the former friends; and the confessions Capote makes in his final months that ultimately reunite them.

The ghosts of the Clutters also appear, seeking resolution and revenge. What secrets from that tragic night do the family members confess? With Capote in Kansas, Kim Powers looks at one of the greatest literary mysteries of the twentieth century and creates a haunting tale of what might have been.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780786726301
Publisher:	Hachette Books
Publication date:	10/20/2008
Sold by:	Hachette Digital, Inc.
Format:	eBook
Pages:	256
File size:	248 KB

About the Author

Kim Powers is an Emmy- and Peabody- Award-winning writer who has worked on ABC's Good Morning America and Primetime. He lives in New York City.

What People are Saying About This

Oscar Hijuelos

"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."--(Oscar Hijuelos, Pulitzer Prize winner for The Mambo Kings Sing Songs of Love and Mr. Ives' Christmas)

Editorial Reviews

[A] dark and captivating first novel.

Advocate

[A] blend of fact and fiction about perhaps the greatest back story in American literature.

USA Today

Powers astutely summons the intense sorrow behind a life-long friendship gone awry.

Entertainment Weekly

Through fiction, [Powers] intriguingly focuses on the end of Capote's self-absorbed life, exploring the demons that haunted his final days.An engaging narrative that sensitively explores the intricacies of transgression and forgiveness within friendship.

New Orleans Times-Picayune

Touching and often hilarious.Powers weaves a deft and clever rewriting of what is known and fabricated about these two mysterious authors.

Bay Area Reporter

A richly detailed story.The characters.are so real that they almost speak from the pages they appear in. The ancillary details, including events from the shared past of Capote and Lee and the separate adult histories of each of them, give fascinating glimpses into their private lives and into the backgrounds of their famous novels.

Echo

Like its subject matter, Capote in Kansas is compelling and intense. Powers's glimpse into the world of two of America's most respected writers sheds light on the burden of fame and great talent.

Sulpher Springs News-Telegram

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

Library Journal