William Kennedy

A "wildly funny" novel of a monumentally unsuccessful newspaper strike in 1960s upstate New York from a Pulitzer Prize--winning author (People). The newspaper strike has stretched on for more than a year. When it began, the Guild boasted over 250 members. Now, they're down to eighteen, with only three truly serious about the cause. Their leader, Bailey, is a columnist with an outsize sense of his own importance and a hatred of scabs that borders on...

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...

The Italian scholar and poet Francesco Petrarch (1304–1374) is best remembered today for vibrant and impassioned love poetry that helped to establish Italian as a literary language. Petrarch inspired later Renaissance writers, who produced an extraordinary body of work regarded today as perhaps the high-water mark of poetic productivity in the European West. These "Petrarchan" poets were self-consciously aware of themselves as poets-as craftsmen,...

When Steven Armstrong tells his children he has fallen in love, he expects them to be happy that his life as a lonely, sixty-five-year-old widower is over. Instead, their father's intended-thirty-three-year-old personal trainer Charlene Hendricks-is exactly the kind of woman they fear. Through marriage, she becomes not only the stepmother to these three grown children, but the rival for their father's world-class fortune. Suddenly, an attack is made...

Albany, New York, Halloween, 1938. Francis Phelan and Helen Archer are bums. She used to be a singer on the radio, he used to be a major league pitcher. Death surrounds them. Helen is sick, one of their pals has cancer, he digs graves at the cemetery and visits the grave of his infant son whom he dropped. Visions of his past haunt him, including ghosts of two men he killed. One night, while drinking, Helen tries to sing at a bar. Next day, Fran visits...