Attachment
Chicago, IL, -- Novelists are generally pretty obscure animals. They don't have the star power of movie stars and rock stars and so our mostly left for the late night public radio programs and the back pages of thin book sections. So when a writer gets covered in three major newspapers in one week, then something is definately up. http://www.dailyherald.com/
Could it be that a man has launched a rocket from Ernest Hemignway's attic? Well, maybe. Rocket Man is a novel that is errie in it's timeliness. The satire of suburban life is very funny and well written and has been compared to Updike and John Irving, but the real phenomenon of this novel is it is about what is happening right now. This is a very hard thing to do for writers. Books take years to write and they take years to be published. A writer is lucky if there is any relevancy at all to the story by the time it hits the bookshelves. But William Hazelgrove has penned a novel in Ernest Hemingway's attic that is about right now. It is about the direct hit the American Dream has taken. "I looked around a few years ago," the author said from his studio in the Hemingway house. "And I just saw a lot of people struggling very hard to make ends meet and I realized then a lot of people wern't making it. That's really how Rocket Man started." The book covers the life of one Dale Hammer as his life implodes in a surrounding suburb of Chicago "He is this guy who has the big car, the big house and he can't pay his bills," Hazelgrove continues, "And so...his life falls apart." The novel came out to the usual fanfare for unknown novels, but rave reviews on Amazon.com and the comparsion of Hazelgrove's book to Updike and Irving by the Chicago Sun Times got the ball rolling. The San Antonio Express named it as one of the Best Books of 2008 and novelist David Liss procliamed it a "first rate comedy.' Then word go out that the book was written in a very unique location. "I thinik it is interesting for people to think of a book having been written in Ernest Hemingways attic," Hazelgrove shrugs. "But once you start to read, then it's all the book and it's either good or it's not." The Chicago Tribune
http://www.chicagotribune.com/
swooped in for a story and a thirty minute radio interview on WGN Sunday Papers with Rick Kogan shot the book into the famed lower digits of Amazon ranking. Then Time Out Chicago ran a story: http://www.timeout.com/
With all the attention, it's almost like someone had launched a rocket from Hemingways attic .
http://www.billhazelgrove.com
Press Contact:
Jim Turner
billhazelgrove.com
27 N. Wacker Drive
Chicago, IL 60606
630-587-1520
jturner@pantonnepress.com
http://www.billhazelgrove.com
Photo:
http://www.prlog.org/
