Stefan Merrill Block, Book Signing Event “The Storm at the Door”

Author Stefan Merrill Block will be signing copies of his critically acclaimed novel “The Storm at the Door” in his hometown of Plano, Texas next month.

Out on June 21, 2011, pre-order your copy of “The Storm at the Door” and save 40% off the list price.

Block’s debut novel, “The Story of Forgetting,” won the 2008 Merck Serono Literature Prize, Best First Fiction at the Rome International Festival of Literature, and the 2009 Fiction Award from The Writers’ League of Texas. Stefan, 28, graduated from Washington University in St. Louis in 2004. His work has been praised by People Magazine, the Boston Globe, NPR, CBS News, and Publishers Weekly, to name a few. He currently resides in Brooklyn, New York with the upwardly mobile crowd…

Book Signing Information

Thursday July 07, 2011 7:00 PM
Barnes & Noble
Creekwalk Village
801 West 15th St Suite E
Plano, TX.

From the Publisher
The past is not past for Katharine Merrill. Even after two decades of volatile marriage, Katharine still believes she can have the life that she felt promised to her by those first exhilarating days with her husband, Frederick. For two months, just before Frederick left to fight in World War II, Katharine received his total attentiveness, his limitless charms, his astonishing range of intellect and wit. Over the years, however, as Frederick’s behavior and moods have darkened, Katharine has covered for him, trying to rein in his great manic passions and bridge his deep wells of sadness: an unending project of keeping up appearances and hoping for the best. But the project is failing. Increasingly, Frederick’s erratic behavior, amplified by alcohol, distresses Katharine and their four daughters and gives his friends and family cause to worry for his sanity. When, in the summer of 1962, a cocktail party ends with her husband in handcuffs, Katharine makes a fateful decision: She commits Frederick to Mayflower Home, America’s most revered mental asylum.

There, on the grounds of the opulent hospital populated by great poets, intellectuals, and madmen, Frederick tries to transform his incarceration into a creative exercise, to take each meaningless passing moment and find the art within it. But as he lies on his room’s single mattress, Frederick wonders how he ever managed to be all that he once was: a father, a husband, a business executive. Under the faltering guidance of a self-obsessed psychiatrist, Frederick and his fellow patients must try to navigate their way through a gray zone of depression, addiction, and insanity.

Meanwhile, as she struggles to raise four young daughters, Katharine tries to find her way back to Frederick through her own ambiguities, delusions, and the damages done by her rose-colored belief in a life she no longer lives.

Inspired by elements of the lives of the author’s grandparents, this haunting love story shifts through time and reaches across generations. Along the way, Stefan Merrill Block stunningly illuminates an age-old truth: even if one’s daily life appears ordinary, one can still wage a silent, secret, extraordinary war.

Source: barnesandnoble.com

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