William Giraldi

Harvard Book Store is pleased to host a book launch party for Busy Monsters, the first novel by local writer and writing instructor WILLIAM GIRALDI. Local favorite STEVE ALMOND will be on hand to introduce the author, and the evening will include a reading from the novel as well as wine and light refreshments.

Memoirist of mediocre fame, Charles Homar has a problem: his bride-to-be, Gillian Lee, has nixed their nuptials and fled to the high seas in search of a legendary giant squid, unleashing an unholy heart wreck upon him. In a hell-bent effort to prove his mettle as an American male and win back Gillian's affections, Charlie crisscrosses the nation seeking counsel, confronting creatures both mythic and real—Bigfoot on the Canadian border, space aliens in Seattle, a professional bodybuilder with Asiatic sex slaves in suburban New Jersey, the demons dancing a rumba inside his own heart—and then writing about his travails every week for a popular magazine. William Giraldi's debut novel explores American excess, the diaphanous line between fiction and fact, and what desperate men and women will do to one another.

"In his riotous debut novel . . . Giraldi tells the story of Charles Homar, a jilted fiancé who embarks on a hilariously ill-advised odyssey to win back his beloved. . . . Charles's journey—filled with offbeat characters, seen through a perfectly skewed worldview, and related in an idiosyncratic voice—might remind readers of the one taken by the equally wrong-headed Ray Midge in Charles Portis's comic masterpiece, The Dog of the South."
—Publishers Weekly (starred)

"William Giraldi's Busy Monsters is rammed with life. It has more than promise. A kind of elegiac intensity, remarkable for so young a man, pervades its harmonies." —Harold Bloom