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)

Fall 2016 Library Journal Editors' Pick

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.

Available for the first time in an English translation, this selection gives non-Francophone readers the chance to encounter the many incarnations of renowned Belgian painter Rene Magritte - the artist, the man, the aspiring noirist, the fire-breathing theorist - in his own words. Through whimsical personal letters, biting apologia, appreciations of fellow artists, pugnacious interviews, farcical film scripts, prose poems, manifestos and much more, a new Magritte emerges: part Surrealist, part literalist, part celebrity, part rascal.While this book is bound to appeal to admirers of Magritte's art and those who are curious about his personal life, there is also much to delight all readers interested in the history and theory of art, philosophy and politics, as well as lovers of creativity and the inner workings of a probing, inquisitive mind unrestricted by genre, medium or fashion.

This title offers an art model's take on taking it off. ""Live Nude Girl"" is a lively meditation on the profession of nude modeling - that 'spine-tingling combination of power and vulnerability, submission and dominance' - as it has been practiced in history and as it is practiced today. Kathleen Rooney draws on her own experiences working as an artist's model, as well as on the stories of famous, notorious, and mysterious artists and models through the ages. Combining personal perspective, historical anecdote, and witty prose, Rooney reveals that both the appeal of posing nude for artists and the appeal of drawing the naked figure lie in our deeply human responses to beauty, sex, love, and death.

In this collection about life as a twenty-something in the twenty-first century, Kathleen Rooney writes with the finesse of someone well beyond her years, but with fresh insights that reveal a girl still making discoveries at every turn. Varied and original, the tales in For You, For You I Am Trilling These Songs recount the perils of falling in love with the unlikeliest of people, of visiting the New York apartments of a vanished poet, and of touring an animal retirement home with her parents. Of getting a Brazilian wax, and of chauffeuring a U.S. senator around town. Of saying good-bye to a cousin who's joining a convent, and of trying to convince herself that she's not wasting her life. This is a book about love and longing, poetry and plagiarism, death and democracy, mountain floods and midwestern cicadas. Here is a young woman struggling to find her place as an adult and a citizen in an America that rarely manages to live up to Whitman's dream of it. Time Out Chicago heralded Rooney as Chicago's "brightest unsung literary star," and with this book, she sings--yes, in fact, she trills--loud and clear.