Monster in a Box

When Spalding Gray first arrived in New York City in 1959, it was to become a writer of great sprawling novels. He got sidetracked into the theater for 30 years until one day his literary agent said, "I think you've got a novel inside you." Instead of elective surgery, Spalding sat down to write if he could, or pace floors in different cities plumbing the depths of writer's block if he couldn't. In this recording, Gray, now one of America's premiere monologists, performs Monster in a Box, the story of one man's struggle against publication, the writing of a 1900-page manuscript that became the much smaller Impossible Vacation. Gray recounts the horrors of putting one word after another, and another, and another...