Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk by Kathleen Rooney

Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk by Kathleen Rooney

NOW A NATIONAL INDIE BESTSELLER

Transporting...witty, poignant and sparkling.
--People (People Picks Book of the Week)

Prescient and quick....A perfect fusing of subject and writer, idea and ideal.
--Chicago Tribune

Extraordinary...hilarious...Elegantly written, Rooney creates a glorious paean to a distant literary life and time--and an unabashed celebration of human connections that bridge past and future.
--Publishers Weekly (starred and boxed)

Rooney's delectably theatrical fictionalization is laced with strands of tart poetry and emulates the dark sparkle of Dorothy Parker, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Truman Capote. Effervescent with verve, wit, and heart, Rooney's nimble novel celebrates insouciance, creativity, chance, and valor.
--Booklist (starred review)

In my reckless and undiscouraged youth, Lillian Boxfish writes, I worked in a walnut-paneled office thirteen floors above West Thirty-Fifth Street...

She took 1930s New York by storm, working her way up writing copy for R.H. Macy's to become the highest paid advertising woman in the country. It was a job that, she says, in some ways saved my life, and in other ways ruined it.

Now it's the last night of 1984 and Lillian, 85 years old but just as sharp and savvy as ever, is on her way to a party. It's chilly enough out for her mink coat and Manhattan is grittier now--her son keeps warning her about a subway vigilante on the prowl--but the quick-tongued poetess has never been one to scare easily. On a walk that takes her over 10 miles around the city, she meets bartenders, bodega clerks, security guards, criminals, children, parents, and parents-to-be, while reviewing a life of excitement and adversity, passion and heartbreak, illuminating all the ways New York has changed--and has not.

A love letter to city life in all its guts and grandeur, Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk by Kathleen Rooney paints a portrait of a remarkable woman across the canvas of a changing America: from the Jazz Age to the onset of the AIDS epidemic; the Great Depression to the birth of hip-hop.

Lillian figures she might as well take her time. For now, after all, the night is still young.

Kathleen Rooney is the author of Reading with Oprah: The Book Club That Changed America, as well as the poetry collections Oneiromance (An Epithalamion), Something Really Good, and That Little Crazy Voluptuousness, which she co-authored with Elisa Gabbert. Twentysomething Essays by Twentysomething Authors chose her article Live Naked Girl.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9781250113320
ISBN 10	1250113326
Title	Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk
Author	Kathleen Rooney
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Hardback
Publisher	St Martin's Press
Year published	2017-01-17
Number of pages	304
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.