DAVE KING, NOVELIST

“The Ha-Ha establishes King as a writer of consequence.”
—The New York Times Book Review

“King has achieved the nearly impossible by writing about grim circumstances without writing a grim book.” —John McNally, The Chicago Tribune

“Literature is rich with unforgettable narrators—Huckleberry Finn, Holden Caulfield, The Great Gatsby’s Nick Carraway, White Noise’s Jack Gladney— but none quite so unique as Howard Kapostash in Dave King’s debut novel, The Ha-Ha…a novel brimming over with wizened compassion, hard-won humor, and full-blooded tenderness….Haunting, hilarious, and human.” —J. Rentilly, Pages

A former painter, Dave King holds a BFA in painting and film from Cooper Union and an MFA in writing from Columbia University. King's debut novel, The Ha-Ha, was named one of the best books of 2005 by The Christian Science Monitor and The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review and was among eighteen books inluded on The Washington Post list of the season's best novels. The Ha-Ha was a finalist for Book-of-the-Month Club's "Best Literary Fiction" award and the Quills Foundation "Best Debut Author" award and won King a 2006-07 Rome Prize Fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

King's poetry has been published in The Paris Review, among other venues, and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. He has taught English at Baruch College and cultural studies and poetry at the School of Visual Arts in New York, and he divides his time between Brooklyn and the Hudson Valley of New York.

The Ha-Ha is currently in development from Warner Brothers Pictures, with Tod Williams slated to direct. The book has also found success in several foreign language editions, with more forthcoming.

ABOUT THE HA-HA
The Ha-Ha is an unforgettable first novel about silence, family, and the imperative of love. Howard Kapostash has not spoken since a blow to the head during his service in Vietnam; thirty years later, words still unravel in his mouth and letters on the page make no sense at all. No one understands that Howard is still the same man he was before enlisting, still awed by the beauty of a landscape, still pining for his high school sweetheart, Sylvia.

Now Sylvia is a single mom with troubles of her own. Hauled into a drug rehab program, she asks Howard to care for her 9 year-old son, Ryan, and the presence of this nervous, resourceful boy in Howard's life transforms him utterly. Forced out of his groove, Howard finds unexpected delights in the joy, sorrows, and love of a makeshift family, but these changes also open him to the risks of loss—and to the rage he's spent a lifetime suppressing.

Written with a stylish precision that prompted some of 2005's best reviews, The Ha-Ha is a deeply moving story about the cost of war and the infinite worth of human connection. As The Boston Globe said, "King's prodigious gift is to reveal Howard's rich inner life, and in the process he spins a luminous meditation on war, family, and all the ways we can converse."

“While The Ha-Ha is a novel of many things—family, friendship, disability, desire—it is mostly a novel of learning to live, of truth and beauty, carrying within it the pain and ugliness those words entail, as well as their more optimistic tones of light and love. King has achieved something important with his first novel: he has given voice to the voiceless." —Pablo Tanguay, Nashville Scene

Dave King Website