In a Manhattan hotel room, the "Love Nest Killings of 1908" take place. But the mystery of who killed whom, and why, does not unravel until we explore the lives of Katrina Taylor and Edward Daughtery. He is a first-generation Irish American and a successful playwright. She is a high-born Protestant, a beautiful seductive woman with complex attitudes towards life. Their marriage is a passionate one, but a cataclysmic hotel fire changes it into something else altogether. Moving back and forth between the 1880s and 1912, The Flaming Corsagefollows Katrina and Edward as other lives impact upon theirs-their socially opposed families; Edward's flirtatious actress paramour, Melissa Spencer; the physician Giles Fitzroy, and his wife; and Edward's friend, the cynical journalist Thomas Maginn. The Flaming Corsageevocatively portrays through the lens of Albany's robust Irishtown and English-Dutch aristocracy the seething, contradictory impulses of our humanity, lusts and furies that know no bounds of time or place.
'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 ...
“So in comes big Barney Duffy with his flashlight and shines it on Bones sitting on poor Jack's chest. 'Sweet mother of mine,' says Barney and he grabbed Bones by the collar and elbow and lifted him off poor Jack like a dirty sock.
From the moment he rescues the beautiful, passionate Maud Fallon from the icy waters of the Hudson one wintry day in 1849, Daniel Quinn is thrust into a bewildering, adventure-filled journey through the tumult of nineteenth-century America.
This is climatic work in William Kennedy's Albany Cycle, riding on the melody of its language and the power of its story, which is full of surprise, comedy, terror, and earthly delight.
ROSCOE is a comic masterpiece from one of America's most revered novelists.
He studied the cut of his jaw, the shape of his eyes, and his smile, the lips open and twisted a little to the left. ... “Ah, you're the one,” Kelly said, putting down his pen and sticking out his right hand to Francis.
The second part of Kennedy's Albany Cycle (one of the greatest and most enjoyable achievements in postwar American literature) contains Quinn's Book, The Flaming Corsage and Legs.
His life radically changed by an encounter with Ernest Hemingway in Cuba, journalist Daniel Quinn embarks on a turbulent journey marked by such historical events as the Albany race riots, the rise of Fidel Castro and the assassination of ...
Legs, the inaugural book in William Kennedy’s acclaimed Albany cycle of novels, brilliantly evokes the flamboyant career of gangster Jack “Legs” Diamond.
“With Legs, Billy Phelan’s Greatest Game, and . . . Ironweed, William Kennedy is making American literature.”—The Washington Post Book World Legs inaugurated William Kennedy’s celebrated cycle of novels...