Author: William Kennedy Publisher: Penguin ISBN: 1101665947 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 433
Book Description
The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Ironweed offers an eloquent history of his colorful hometown in this marvelous book that's part journalism and part memoir. William Kennedy's celebrated cycle of novels has put Albany on the literary map. In O Albany! we visit the city's ethnic and social neighborhoods. We meet uncommon characters who tread on Kennedy's stage—Erastus Corning, America's longest-running mayor (forty-three years in office); the Prohibition celebrity Jack "Legs" Diamond; the black matriarch Olivia Rorie, who transformed Albany's slums; Nelson Rockefeller and the "greatest marble project in the history of the world"; the political boss Dan O'Connell, who took City Hall in 1921 and never let go, even after he died. Embellished with fifty-five vintage photographs and eleven maps drawn for this book, O Albany! is a historical lover letter from Kennedy to his native city. “A nice blend of nostalgia and serious history...You come away from this book's fascinating view of the American experience, the human experience, feeling hopeful.”—The New York Times Book Review
Author: Tammis K. Groft Publisher: Albany Institute of History and Art ISBN: 1438429940 Category : Art Languages : en Pages : 336
Book Description
Founded in 1791, the Albany Institute of History and Art is one of the nation's oldest cultural institutions. Today, it boasts outstanding collections largely focused on New York State's Upper Hudson Valley. These include Hudson River School landscape paintings, portraits by Ezra Ames and Charles Loring Elliott, sculpture by Erastus Dow Palmer, landscape and interior paintings by Walter Launt Palmer, and Albany –made silver and other crafts. This comprehensive overview of the Albany Institute of History and Art's American art and decorative-arts collections, presents color plates and essays on about 130 objects (of a total exceeding 20,000). Dating from the beginning of the seventeenth century to the 1990s, each object in this volume was chosen for its national significance, artistic merit, and relevance to the Institute's mission: collecting and interpreting the art, history, and culture of New York State's Upper Hudson Valley through four centuries.
Author: William Kennedy Publisher: Simon and Schuster ISBN: 1849838496 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 320
Book Description
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. As he quests after the beguiling and elusive Maud, Daniel will witness the rise and fall of great dynasties in upstate New York, epochal prize fights, exotic life in the theatre, visitations from spirits beyond the grave, horrific battles between Irish immigrants and the "Know-Nothings," vicious New York draft riots, heroic passages through the Underground Railroad, and the bloody despair of the Civil War. Filled with Dickensian characters, a vivid sense of history, and a marvellously inventive humor, Quinn's Bookis an engaging delight by an acclaimed modern master.
Author: A.J. Albany Publisher: Tin House Books ISBN: 1935639773 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 186
Book Description
Wise beyond her years and hip to the unpredictable ways of life at all too early an age, A.J. Albany guides us through dope and deviance of the late 1960s and early 1970s in Hollywood shadowy underbelly and beyond. A. J. Albany's recollection of life with her father, the great jazz pianist Joe Albany, is the story of one girl's unsentimental education. Joe played with the likes of Charles Mingus, Lester Young, and Charlie Parker, but between gigs he slipped into drug-induced obscurity. It was during these times that his daughter knew him best. After her mother disappeared, six-year-old Amy Jo and her charming, troubled father set up housekeeping in a seamy Hollywood hotel. While Joe finished a set in some red-boothed dive, chances were you'd find Amy curled up to sleep on someone's fur coat, clutching a 78 of Louis Armstrong's "Sugar Blues" or, later, a photograph of the man himself, inscribed, "To little Amy Jo, always in love with you--Pops." Wise beyond her years and hip to the unpredictable ways of Old Lady Life at all too early an age, A. J. Albany guides us through the dope and deviance of the late 1960s and early 1970s in Hollywood's shadowy underbelly and beyond. What emerges is a raw, gripping, and surprisingly sympathetic portrait of a young girl trying to survive among the outcasts, misfits, and artists who surrounded her.
Author: William Kennedy Publisher: Penguin ISBN: 0142001732 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 305
Book Description
“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.
Author: William Kennedy Publisher: Simon and Schuster ISBN: 1849838364 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 208
Book Description
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.
Author: William Kennedy Publisher: Simon and Schuster ISBN: 1849838534 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 270
Book Description
It is 1958 and the Phelan clan has gathered to hear Peter Phelan's will, read by the living Peter himself, an artist whose paintings about members of the family have given him belated critical recognition. The paintings illuminate the lives of his brother Francis (the exiled hero of Ironweed), and a family ancestor, Malachi McIlhenny, a true madman beset by demons, and determined to send them back to hell. Orson Purcell, bastard son of Peter, and half-mad himself, encounters his first true solace through this obsessive and close-knit family he has never quite entered; most especially through his Aunt Molly, whose intense love affair holds secrets that only another love can resurrect. It is through Orson's modern eye that we see the tragedies, obsessions, and clandestine joys of this singular family. 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.
Author: Robin Oliveira Publisher: Penguin ISBN: 0399564268 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 433
Book Description
2019 FINALIST FOR THE WASHINGTON STATE BOOK AWARD “Stunning. . . Oliveira writes with feeling.” —The New York Times Book Review “[An] engrossing story. . . that feels utterly timely.” —People, “The Best New Books” New York, 1879: An epic blizzard descends on Albany, devastating the city. When the snow finally settles, two newly orphaned girls are missing. Determined not to give up hope, Dr. Mary Sutter, a former Civil War surgeon, searches for the two sisters. When what happened to them is finally revealed, Dr. Sutter must fight the most powerful of Albany's citizens, risking personal and public danger as she seeks to protect the fragile, putting at risk loves and lives in her quest to right unimaginable wrongs. As contemporary as it is historic, Winter Sisters is part gripping thriller, part family saga, and ultimately a story of trauma and resilience that explores the tremendous good and unspeakable evil of which humans are capable.
Author: William Kennedy
Author: Frank S. Robinson
Author: Tammis K. Groft
Author: Paul Grondahl
Author: William Kennedy
Author: A.J. Albany
Author: William Kennedy
Author: William Kennedy
Author: William Kennedy
Author: Robin Oliveira