William Kennedy (5)

Free and Open to the Public. "Here's an unbeatable setup. Pulitzer Prize winner and MacArthur Fellow Kennedy, who gave us the great "Albany Cycle," puts journalist Daniel Quinn (not of his Quinn's Book) in the Floridita bar in 1957 Havana, where he meets Ernest Hemingway. It's the start of something ... (more)good: a novel that runs from Cuba to race riots in Albany as Robert Kennedy's assassination looms. Kennedy's first in a decade should be pretty amazing."- Library Journal. Pulitzer Prize winner William Kennedy's long awaited new novel first takes us to Cuba in 1957, where American journalist Daniel Quinn has some legendary encounters and experiences and meets the woman he will marry. The action then moves to Kennedy's beloved Albany in 1968 where political unrest could inflame a city already quivering with racial tension. Kennedy masterfully weaves together the parallel actions of several different characters as everything comes to a final boil. William Kennedy was born and raised in Albany, New York. His Albany Cycle of novels includes Legs, Billy Phelan's Greatest Game, Ironweed, Quinn's Book, Very Old Bones, The Flaming Corsage, and Roscoe. A Journalist before becoming a novelist, Kennedy covered the civil rights movement and Cuban revolutions in the 1950s and 1960s. He is a MacArthur Fellow and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He lives in Averil Park, New York. If you cannot attend the reading, but would like a signed copy of Chango's Beads and Two-Tone Shoes, you may reserve it at http://acappellabooks.com/ev_kennedy.... .

The Library's book discussion group runs from September 2007-May 2008 on the second Sunday of the month at 2pm. The discussion is free and open to the public.