About
Born in Richmond, Virginia, and carted back and forth between Virginia and Baltimore, I blame my rootless, restless personality on my father. He was and is a traveling salesman with a keen gift of gab, great wit, a ready joke, and could sell white tennis shoes to coal miners.
It was during these sojourns up and down the east coast I soaked up the stories that would later be Tobacco Sticks and Mica Highways. I think authors should exploit their family history before raping the rest of the culture for material.
Dad finally got tired of the east and moved to the Midwest when I was fourteen. We settled outside of Chicago. It is here I came of age and went off to college for seven years -- two degrees and one novel later I returned to Chicago and lived in many different apartments, trying to get a little two hundred page manuscript called Ripples published.
When a local printer said he would take a chance on my book, I jumped and had my first novel published by a man who had never published anything. Great reviews and moderate sales put me back to my jobs as a janitor, baker, waiter, construction worker, teacher, real estate tycoon, mortgage broker, professor, security guard, salesman -- anything to make a buck and keep writing. The printer lost his mind and published my second novel, too. That landed me with Bantam after some rave reviews and a paperback auction for my second novel, Tobacco Sticks.
A third novel, Mica Highways, was sold on less than one hundred and fifty pages to Bantam and then I did a strange thing -- I settled down to writing in Ernest Hemingway's birthplace in Oak Park, Illinois. I have since been looking for the Great American Novel up in the old red oak rafters and I think I might have finally found one... we'll see.
The Seekers: The Stuff of Stars (Dystopian Sci-Fi - Book 2)
Description
<p>This second book in <em>The Seekers</em> dystopian series continues the story started in the critically-acclaimed <em>The Children of Darkness</em>, winner of the <strong>Pinnacle Book Achievement Award, Summer 2015 - Best Book in the Category of SCIENCE FICTION</strong>, and winner of the <strong>Awesome Indies Seal of Excellence</strong>....</p><h1><strong><em>The Stuff of Stars</em> by David Litwack</strong></h1><p>Evolved Publishing presents the second book in the new dystopian series <em>The Seekers</em>. [DRM-Free]</p><h2><em style="font-size:13px;line-height:1.6em;">“But what are we without dreams?”</em></h2><p>Against all odds, Orah and Nathaniel have found the keep and revealed the truth about the darkness, initiating what they hoped would be a new age of enlightenment. But the people were more set in their ways than anticipated, and a faction of vicars whispered in their ears, urging a return to traditional ways.</p><p>Desperate to keep their movement alive, Orah and Nathaniel cross the ocean to seek the living descendants of the keepmasters’ kin. Those they find on the distant shore are both more and less advanced than expected.</p><p>The seekers become caught between the two sides, and face the challenge of bringing them together to make a better world. The prize: a chance to bring home miracles and a more promising future for their people. But if they fail this time, they risk not a stoning but losing themselves in the twilight of a never-ending dream.</p><p><strong>Be sure to start with the first book in this series, the multiple award-winning <em>The Children of Darkness</em>. And don't miss David's award-winning speculative saga, <em>The Daughter of the Sea and the Sky</em></strong></p>
Story Behind The Book
Rocket Man was written after I moved to the suburbs from the city. I looked around and found myself and others unable to keep up with what had become the American Dream...the big car, house, bascially the overheated middle class life that had become the American nightmare. When I became the Rocket Man for my son's Scout Troop I knew I had a motif to write this novel of a man isolated in a world rapidly spinning out of control. Rocket Man is a story of our time. A man about to lose his home, trying desperately to hang to what really matters in life. In this way, Rocket Man, is really about us.
Reviews
Best Books of the Year...San Antonoio Express<br />Funniest Novel since Richard Russo's Straight Man...Chicago Sun Times<br />THE FUNNIEST NOVEL OF THE ELECTION YEAR. William Elliott Hazelgrove’s Rocket Man is in the tradition of Richard Russo’s Nobody’s Fool, Richard Ford’s Independence Day and Tom Poratta‘s Election; all three writers coming to grips with contemporary life in the suburbs. Rocket Man is a satire of life today...Chicago Tribune
