Presidio by Randy Kennedy
A fluent, mordant, authentic, propulsive narrative wonderfully lit from within by an intriguing main character...The Texas of the novel...has been written about before, and very well. Kennedy rises to the challenge and succeeds so well that Larry McMurtry and James Lee Burke have offered their praise.--Lee Child, The New York Times Book Review Set in the 1970s in the vast and arid landscape of the Texas panhandle, this darkly comic and stunningly mature literary debut tells the story of a car thief and his brother who set out to recover some stolen money and inadvertently kidnap a Mennonite girl who has her own reasons for being on the run. Troy Falconer returns home after years of working as a solitary car thief to help his younger brother, Harlan, search for his wife, who has run away with the little money he had. When they steal a station wagon for the journey, the brothers accidentally kidnap Martha Zacharias, a Mennonite girl asleep in the back of the car. Martha turns out to be a stubborn survivor who refuses to be sent home, so together these unlikely road companions attempt to escape across the Mexican border, pursued by the police and Martha's vengeful father. The story is told partly through Troy's journal, in which he chronicles his encounters with con artists, down-and-outers, and roadside philosophers, people looking for fast money, human connection, or a home long since vanished. The journal details a breakdown that has left Troy unable to function in conventional society; he is reduced to haunting motels, stealing from men roughly his size, living with their possessions in order to have none of his own and all but disappearing into their identities. With a page-turning plot about a kidnapped child, gorgeously written scenes that probe the soul of the American West, and an austere landscape as real as any character, Presidio packs a powerful punch of anomie, dark humor, pathos, and suspense.
Randy Kennedy was born in San Antonio and lived in Plains, Texas, a tiny farming community in the Texas Panhandle where his father worked as a telephone lineman and his mother as a teachers' aide. He attended the University of Texas at Austin for his education. He relocated to New York City in 1991 and worked for The New York Times for twenty-five years, first as a city reporter and then as a writer covering the art world. Presidio, his first novel, was released in 2018 by Touchstone/Simon & Schuster and was praised by novelist Annie Proulx as a deep and uncommon work. Subwayland: Travels in the Land Underneath New York, a collection of his city essays, was published in 2004.
He has written about many of the most renowned artists of the previous 50 years for The New York Times and The New York Times Magazine, including John Chamberlain, Claes Oldenburg, Bruce Nauman, Vito Acconci, Nan Goldin, Paul McCarthy, and Isa Genzken. He is currently the head of special projects at Hauser & Wirth, an international art gallery. He and his clinical psychologist wife, Janet Krone Kennedy, live in Brooklyn with their two children.
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9781501153860 |
| ISBN 10 | 1501153862 |
| Title | Presidio |
| Author | Randy Kennedy |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Hardback |
| Publisher | Atria Books |
| Year published | 2018-08-21 |
| Number of pages | 320 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |