Video: Meet Jack!
Meet Jack Gantos!
Book Signing at Inkwood Books
Tuesday, September 13th at 6pm
216 South Armenia Avenue, Tampa

Gantos's new semi-autobiographical novel DEAD END IN NORVELT (Farrar Straus Giroux BYR / September 13, 2011) takes the facts of his 1960s upbringing combined with a fictional murder mystery to tell the story of an imagined Jack Gantos not entirely unlike the real one.

Melding the entirely true and the wildly fictional, Dead End in Norvelt is a novel about an incredible two months for a kid named Jack Gantos, whose plans for vacation excitement are shot down when he is "grounded for life" by his feuding parents, and whose nose spews bad blood at every little shock he gets. But plenty of excitement (and shocks) are coming Jack's way once his mom loans him out to help a feisty old neighbor with a most unusual chore-typewriting obituaries for the local newspaper filled with stories about the people who founded his utopian town. As one obituary leads to another, Jack is launched on a strange adventure involving molten wax, Eleanor Roosevelt, twisted promises, a homemade airplane, Girl Scout cookies, a man on a trike, a dancing plague, voices from the past, Hells Angels . . . and possibly murder. 

But Gantos is no stranger to using his real life as literary inspiration. The New York Times Book Review called Hole in My Life, his Printz Honor Winning memoir for young adults, "a tale of courage and redemption proving that a bad start in life does not have to lead to a bad life story."  Gantos reveals these uncomfortable truths about himself because he wants young readers to know that one mistake does not define a life. He once spent time in federal prison for drug smuggling-now he's an award-winning children's author with more than forty books published!

Endlessly surprising, this sly, sharp-edged narrative is the author at his very best, making readers laugh out loud at the most unexpected things in a dead-funny depiction of growing up in a slightly off-kilter place where the past is present, the present is confusing, and the future is completely up in the air.