Download or read book Quinn s Book written by William Kennedy and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2017-01-03 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1849, a boy saves a girl from the Hudson River in this story “of wonders and sweetness, magic and horrors [that] immerses itself in the marvelous” (The Boston Sunday Globe). A penniless Irish orphan, Daniel Quinn is among the crowds gathered at the Hudson River in Albany to watch a legendary dancer aboard the ferry. But when the boat strikes the ice that chokes the water on this wintry day, awe turns to terror. Though the dancer’s life is lost, Daniel risks his neck and rescues her niece, Maud Fallon. But just as he’s falling in love with the beautiful, passionate girl, she’s snatched away from him. As the years pass and Daniel continues his quest for the beguiling Maud, he will witness the rise and fall of great dynasties in upstate New York, epochal prize fights, the exotic world of the theater, visitations from spirits beyond the grave, horrific battles between Irish immigrants and the Know-Nothings, the New York draft riots, the perils of the Underground Railroad, and the bloody despair of the Civil War. Rich with nineteenth-century history and filled with flourishes of humor and magical realism, this is an “engrossing and eerily profound” novel (Time) from an author who, in the words of Stephen King, “writes with verve and nerve [and] paints a full and lively canvas.” In the tradition of E. L. Doctorow’s Billy Bathgate or Mark Helprin’s Winter’s Tale, it is a remarkable saga from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Ironweed.
Download or read book Ironweed written by William Kennedy and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2011-12-22 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The beloved Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, basis of the film starring Jack Nicholson and Meryl Streep. Francis Phelan, ex-big-leaguer, part-time gravedigger, full-time bum with the gift of gab, is back in town. He left Albany twenty-two years earlier after he dropped his infant son accidentally, and the boy died. Now he's on the way back to the wife and home he abandoned, haunted at every corner by the ghosts of his violent life. Francis; his wino ladyfriend of nine years, Helen; and his stumblebum pal, Rudy, shuffle their ragtag way through the city's bleakest streets, surviving on gumption, muscatel, and black wit. estiny is not their business. 'The premise of Ironweed was so unpromising, that in marketing terms the writer still to this day finds it funny: the story of a bunch of itinerant alcoholics, knocking around Kennedy's hometown, falling out, having visions, trying to pass for sober to cadge a bed for the night in the homeless shelter.' Guardian 'But for all the rich variety of prose and event, from hallucination to bedrock realism to slapstick and to blessed quotidian peace, ''Ironweed'' is more austere than its predecessors. It is more fierce, but also more forgiving.' Quoted from the classic New York Times review of Ironweed, which made it an overnight sensation.
Download or read book Roscoe written by William Kennedy and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2002-11-26 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Thick with crime, passion, and backroom banter” (The New Yorker), Roscoe is an odyssey of great scope and linguistic verve, a deadly, comic masterpiece from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Ironweed It's V-J Day, the war is over, and Roscoe Conway, after twenty-six years as the second in command of Albany's notorious political machine, decides to quit politics forever. But there's no way out, and only his Machiavellian imagination can help him cope with the erupting disasters. Every step leads back to the past—to the early loss of his true love, the takeover of city hall, the machine's fight with FDR and Al Smith to elect a governor, and the methodical assassination of gangster Jack "Legs" Diamond. William Kennedy’s Albany Cycle of novels reflect what he once described as the fusion of his imagination with a single place. A native and longtime resident of Albany, New York, his work moves from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, chronicling family life, the city’s netherworld, and its spheres of power—financial, ethnic, political—often among the Irish-Americans who dominated the city in this period. The novels in his cycle include, Legs, Billy Phelan’s Greatest Game, Ironweed, Quinn’s Book, Very Old Bones, The Flaming Corsage, and Roscoe.
Download or read book Billy Phelan s Greatest Game written by William Kennedy and published by Penguin. This book was released on 1983-01-27 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The second novel in William Kennedy’s much-loved Albany cycle depicts Billy Phelan, a slightly tarnished poker player, pool hustler, and small-time bookie. A resourceful man full of Irish pluck, Billy works the fringes of the Albany sporting life with his own particular style and private code of honor, until he finds himself in the dangerous position of potential go-between in the kidnapping of a political boss’s son.
Download or read book Legs written by William Kennedy and published by Penguin. This book was released on 1983-01-27 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Legs, the inaugural book in William Kennedy’s acclaimed Albany cycle of novels, brilliantly evokes the flamboyant career of gangster Jack “Legs” Diamond. Through the equivocal eyes of Diamond’s attorney, Marcus Gorman (who scraps a promising political career for the more elemental excitement of the criminal underworld), we watch as Legs and his showgirl mistress, Kiki Roberts, blaze their gaudy trail across the tabloid pages of the 1920s and 1930s.
Download or read book O Albany written by William Kennedy and published by Penguin. This book was released on 1985-09-03 with total page 433 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Kennedy's O Albany! is in part the non-fictional stories he covered in his novels, Legs and Billy Phelan's Greatest Game. Kennedy retells the exploits of the bootlegger Jack 'Legs' Diamond, the bungled 1933 kidnapping of John O'Connell, Jr., heir to the Albany Democratic machine and explores the Albany of his past, including its demographics and vanished neighborhoods.
Download or read book Ultimate Go Notebook written by William Kennedy and published by . This book was released on 2021-07-08 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Very Old Bones written by William Kennedy and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2017-01-03 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From a Pulitzer Prize–winning author: “An immensely gratifying novel” of an Irish-American clan whose exploits changed Albany forever (The Boston Globe). When it was built, the Phelan mansion was the only home on the block. In the decades since, countless tragedies have swept through its rambling halls, but no matter how many times its foundations have been rocked, the old house still stands. Now, in 1958, its sole occupants are the eccentric old painter Peter Phelan and his illegitimate son, Orson, who sees all—but says nothing. When Peter invites his remaining family to hear him read his will aloud, it forces the Phelan clan to reckon with the most powerful force in Albany: their own tortured history. Unveiling a series of portraits inspired by family tragedy, Peter takes the Phelans back into the past, as far as 1887, forcing them to come face-to-face with the origins of the family curse. As the raucous narrative unfolds, Orson does his best to grapple with his roots, and the knowledge that the sins of the past can never truly be washed away. William Kennedy’s eight-book Albany Cycle is one of the most ambitious projects in modern historical fiction, a kaleidoscopic portrait of a city whose heroes are its corrupt politicians, conmen, and thieves. The Phelans are one of the roughest families in American literature, and also one of the greatest, who “can claim a place beside O’Neill’s Tyrones and Steinbeck’s Joads” (Library Journal).
Download or read book Charlie Malarkey and the Belly button Machine written by William Kennedy and published by Puffin. This book was released on 1990 with total page 44 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When Charlie and his friend Iggy lose their belly buttons they investigate and discover an insidious plot to steal and resell belly buttons.
Download or read book Toy Soldiers written by Daniel Petrie and published by . This book was released on 1990 with total page 510 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Press kit includes 1 booklet containing listing of cast and credits and production information.
Download or read book Reading William Kennedy written by Michael Patrick Gillespie and published by Syracuse University Press. This book was released on 2001-12-01 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A favorite of library and community reading groups, William Kennedy is best known for his novels Ironweed and his most recent, The Flaming Corsage. This eminently readable book provides a helpful introduction to students and others interested in his work. With engaging candor, Michael Patrick Gillespie provides a keen analysis of Kennedy's best-known works, a firm base for interpretation, and a better understanding of the cultural world that shapes the characters and informs the plots of Kennedy's novels. Rather than prescribing what one should see when reading Kennedy's works, the book moves to the next stage of exploring diverse responses to Kennedy's canon, broadening the reader's awareness of the range of alternative strategies and perspective. Gillespie begins with an introduction that outlines the imaginative context for Kennedy's work. Subsequent chapters, in three parts, provide extended treatments of his early work, key elements in the first three Albany novels, and finally the maturity of his overall fiction, including his new play, Grand View.
Download or read book Conversations with William Kennedy written by William Kennedy and published by . This book was released on 1997 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: To read these interviews given between 1969 and 1996 is to gain insights into William Kennedy's high seriousness in pursuing the craft of fiction and to witness the artistic growth of this remarkable writer. The twenty-four interviews in this collection reveal how the opportunities and challenges in Kennedy's writing life parallel those other contemporary writers have faced in the last years of the century.The high drama of imagined worlds, he says, becomes a Rosetta Stone, the key that unlocks the very real mysteries and complexities of our daily lives.You're inventing out of a confluence of known facts and random ideas, he says about the process of writing, juxtaposing reality and abstractions, and then wham! You've got something brand new in your head, and on the page. You're functioning on a plane of existence you didn't know was possible. That's creation, and it's profound pleasure. It's what you live for.Readers of these interviews will be privy to another process as well, the arduous but exciting process by which Kennedy has emerged as a major voice in contemporary letters. His meteoric rise to fame in 1983 and his continuing popularity since are the stuff of drama and folklore. In that year his novel Ironweed, rejected earlier by thirteen publishers, was finally published by Viking. It earned him a MacArthur Award, the New York Book Critics Circle Award, and a Pulitzer Prize. Governor Mario Cuomo honored him with the New York State Governor's Arts Award and declared that in Kennedy Albany (had) found its Homer. Hollywood came calling and secured screen rights to Ironweed, Legs, and Billy Phelan's Greatest Game. With Francis Ford Coppola, Kennedy co-wrote thescreenplay of The Cotton Club.The career that lifted off with such dramatic momentum has shown no signs of flagging. With steady regularity, Kennedy continues to add to his Albany Cycle of novels, as he experiments boldly with the craft of fiction.
Download or read book Roscoe written by William Kennedy and published by . This book was released on 2002-09-30 with total page 291 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Here is a comic masterpiece from one of America's most important novelists. You've never met a politician like Roscoe Conway: a suave Falstaffian in a double-breasted white Palm Beach suit, unscrupulous, brilliant, exploding with courtly romance. It's V-J Day, the war's over, & Roscoe, after 26 years as chief brain truster of Albany's notorious political machine, decides to quit politics forever. But there's no exit, only new political wars & scandalous threats to his family. Every step forward leads Roscoe back to the past -- to the early loss of his true love, his heroics in the WWI, the takeover of city hall, the machine's fight with FDR & Al Smith to elect a governor, & the methodical assassination of gangster Jack Legs” Diamond.
Download or read book William Kennedy written by Edward C. Reilly and published by . This book was released on 1991 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Legs written by William Kennedy and published by Penguin. This book was released on 1983-01-27 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Legs, the inaugural book in William Kennedy’s acclaimed Albany cycle of novels, brilliantly evokes the flamboyant career of gangster Jack “Legs” Diamond. Through the equivocal eyes of Diamond’s attorney, Marcus Gorman (who scraps a promising political career for the more elemental excitement of the criminal underworld), we watch as Legs and his showgirl mistress, Kiki Roberts, blaze their gaudy trail across the tabloid pages of the 1920s and 1930s.
Download or read book Riding the Yellow Trolley Car written by William Kennedy and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2017-01-03 with total page 459 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The collected nonfiction of the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Ironweed: “A great pleasure to read no matter what the subject” (Library Journal). When William Kennedy arrives in Barcelona, his guidebook recommends taking the trolley around town—but the trolleys haven’t run in the city for years. He’s on his way to interview the novelist Gabriel García Márquez when, out of the corner of his eye, he sees something impossible: a yellow trolley running down the street. Márquez, however, is not surprised; like all great writers of both fiction and nonfiction, he knows that impossible things happen every day. A remarkable collection from one of America’s greatest authors, Riding the Yellow Trolley Car features work from all stages of Kennedy’s career. Through each piece runs the thread that ties together his greatest works: a love and deep understanding of his hometown, the city of Albany, New York, and the good and evil men who have made it what it is. Featuring interviews and essays on some of the most prominent authors of the twentieth century, from Saul Bellow and E. L. Doctorow to Norman Mailer and the legendary García Márquez—as well as insightful reflections on topics from baseball to the death of a prominent cat to Kennedy’s wife’s hiccups—Riding the Yellow Trolley Car is an essential book for all those who love to read, or live to write.
Download or read book My Secret Life written by William Kennedy and published by Austin Macauley Publishers. This book was released on 2024-03-28 with total page 64 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: My Secret Life is the author’s account of his personal struggle to overcome societal norms that overwhelmed him throughout his life and almost defeated him. His struggle, while unique and personal, required courage, resilience, and strength and is one that can be related to and recognized by all. His powerful, open, and compelling account of his battle to overcome the psychological, mental, and emotional effects caused by living a secret life, and how he almost lost that battle, is a story of monumental triumph over adversity. The informal and very personal writing style draws the reader into a personal, historical, yet contemporary history, very relevant for the times we are living in today. A strong bond is formed between the reader and the author as they share in the moments of despair, pain, and fear, but also hope and joy, climaxing in the triumph of life over adversity. Like a phoenix from the flames, the author’s captivating, engrossing account of his life hopes to inspire and liberate others, setting them free to live an open, fully authentic life, free from the shame and fear of living with a secret.
