Capote in Kansas: A Ghost Story by Kim Powers

From the Publisher

They were children—she, a tomboy in overalls; he, a summer visitor from New Orleans, always dressed in immaculate white linen. Twenty-five years later, he had exchanged the white linen for a velvet suit and a poison pen, and had taken New York's literary world by storm while she struggled to put pen to paper and sweat out the story of her childhood.

He was Truman Capote; she was Harper Lee.
They would reunite in Kansas to create In Cold Blood, one of the most riveting works of mystery and true crime ever written. And they would start talk of an even greater, unspoken mystery and crime: What happened between them—and who really wrote To Kill a Mockingbird? How did two innocents from a backwoods Southern town go on to become two of the most celebrated writers of the twentieth century, and why—just a few years later—did they stop speaking to one another? Or did they?

Author Kim Powers has conjured a sort of deathbed confession from Capote, in which he picks up the phone to Harper Lee one final time.

In Capote in Kansas, Powers has created an unforgettable "what might have been"—a fantasia of ghosts seeking resolve and revenge...murder in the heart (and heartlands)...and memories, regrets, laughter, tears, and love—for a past that was, that will never be again.

Advocate

[A] dark and captivating first novel.

Echo

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.

Bay Area Reporter

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

Sulpher Springs News-Telegram

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.

Entertainment Weekly

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

New Orleans Times-Picayune

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.

USA Today

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

David Keymer - Library Journal

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.

What People Are Saying

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)

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