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Patrick Bluett is searching for a new life in the low light of a
Copenhagen winter. Divorced and navigating the rocky relationship
with his grown-up, nest-flown children, Bluett spends his days
listening to John Coltrane's majestic jazz symphony A Love Supreme
and gazing out at the frozen streets, a desolate landscape that
somehow matches his reflection in the window. His nights, however,
are a little different. Walking unsteadily across the cobblestones,
he moves between the neon-tinted bars and clubs of his adopted
home, talking whiskey, women and the world with the other lost
souls of Copenhagen, those who only seem to come out at night. But
when he befriends a neighbour, a man in similar circumstances, the
apartment across the hall reveals some strange secrets and Bluett
realises how little he really knows of the darkness of the city.
Infidelity anyone? Vicariously enjoy the unfaithfulness of
twenty-four writers in this anthology, Runnin' Around, subtitled
The Serving House Book of Infidelity. The cover is a black-
and-white Mark Hillringhouse photograph of an appropriately seedy
motel advertising day-rates. However, the content is not seedy at
all, including Pulitzer Prize winning poet Stephen Dunn, who leads
off with a poem that originally appeared in the New Yorker,
inspiring editors Kennedy and Cummins to solicit eleven poets, two
essayists, and eleven fiction writers to take a turn at telling a
tale of infidelity, be it carnal or spiritual or somewhere in
between. Included is the work of poets Dunn, Jack Ridl, H. L. Hix,
Laura McCullough, Rick Mulkey, Steve Davenport, Renee Ashley, Dan
Turell, Elisabeth Murawski, Flower Conroy, and Mark Hillringhouse,
essays by Rebecca Chace and Minna Proctor, and short stories by
Timmy Waldron, Per Smidl, Duff Brenna, Roisin McLean, Victor
Rangel-Ribeiro, Greg Herriges, Susan Tekulve, Dennis F. Bormann and
Kennedy and Cummins as well. Read it and lust
"Kennedy's...characters are full, alive, and each story is rich and
deep. He writes with wisdom, and it is perhaps this wisdom that
turns some of his stories of great sorrow into something
triumphant." - Andre Dubus "Thomas E. Kennedy's . . . stories pulse
with humor, moral edge, and a deep sympathy for the human
predicament. . . . These stories come as a gift from across the sea
of a fine writer's untamed imagination." - James Carroll, National
Book Award-winner "Thomas E. Kennedy's characters are smart, full
of want, significantly flawed, scared, yet often hopeful. Readers
can't help but be touched by the clarity and generosity that are
the hallmarks of Kennedy's very literary and very human stories." -
Linda Swanson-Davies, Glimmer Train ." . . shimmering with
emotional honesty . . ." - The New York Times ..".wide-ranging and
assured..." - The New Yorker "Thomas Kennedy is a true discovery,
an author of rare intelligence and moral vision . . . compelling
and beautifully written." -Alain de Botton, author of How Proust
Can Change Your Life
The Book of Worst Meals contains essays by 25 writers on their
worst culinary experiences, tales of wretched dining in Paris,
Edinburgh, Philadelphia, and throughout the UK, as well as
disastrous holiday meals and the food of failed relationships.
Thomas E. Kennedy, an American expatriate living in Denmark, has
written a remarkable nonfiction novel in personal essays that
explores the perils and marvels of the aging body and the eternal
heart.
Winter Tales: Men Write About Aging is a miscellaneous collection
of poems, essays and illustrations from professional writers and
artists expressing their thoughts on the subject of aging. Their
views are filled with insight, wisdom and humor, riveting accounts
that may make you sad, or make you happy, perhaps even giddy,
perhaps wiser, and certainly contemplative. You may see yourself
and others you know who are in the same predicament. You might find
yourself smiling wryly and even laughing at times. This is a bright
book of life, not death, which these wonderful (at times brilliant)
artists have created. Winter Tales is a timely book, given our
country's aging population of boomers who will take comfort in
knowing they are not alone when it comes to dealing with what aging
is doing to their minds and bodies. Take and read. Join the
camaraderie. Welcome aboard.
Kennedys expatriate life in Denmark assures him of fresh, lucid
vision on his return trips to the states, especially during his New
York sojourns. He can be wry, confused, indignant, comic]but what
declares itself most is his openness to the odd, the
out-of-the-way, the down-and-out, the tawdry, the fading, the
provincial in the midst of the glitz, recalling for us the photos
of Weegee (or, in another slice of America, Walker Evans) and the
prose of Studs Terkel. This book is a small swig of 100-proof
empathy. ALBERT GOLDBARTH In these sculptured essays, Kennedy will
win your heart and beguile your mind as he proves once again that
everyone has an interesting story to tell. Kennedy's synesthesia
allows him to listen with his eyes and give us an artists
brilliantly-tuned nuance for the harmonious sound of words. Call
Riding the Dog a literary guide to the kindness, the paranoia, the
civility and incivility of New York City and environs south and
southeast. Meet those whose experiences and attitudes are tattooed
literally and figuratively on their bodies denoting the difficult,
down-to-earth, humanistic (sometimes barely human, occasionally
spiritual) lives they've lived. DUFF BRENNA As with Orwell,
Dickens, Gellhorn, and many others, Thomas E. Kennedy has pushed
the essay form to its brightest moments, in which fact can have its
poetry, its narrative, its characters, its emotion, and its
intellectual integrity].This is Kennedys gift: language not as an
instrument of explanation but as reality itself].We read these
essays expecting to learn less about how we might think than how we
might live.
Imprisoned and tortured for months by Pinochet's henchmen for
teaching political poetry to his students, Bernardo Greene is
visited by two angels who promise him that he will survive to
experience beauty and love once again. Months later, in Copenhagen,
the Chilean exile befriends Michela Ibsen, herself a survivor of
domestic abuse. In the long nights of summer, the two of them
struggle to heal, to forgive those who have left them damaged, and
to trust themselves to love. Dense with wisdom and humanity, "In
the Company of Angels" is a powerful testament to the resilience
and complexity of the human heart.
Praise for "In the Company of Angels"
"Wide-ranging and assured."-"New Yorker"
"If its stellar quality is any indication, the entire Copenhagen
Quartet] promises to be an exceptional reading experience ...
Kennedy has a] fertile imagination and all-embracing
empathy."-"Booklist "(starred review)
"As elegant as it is beautiful, as important as it is profound.
A marvel of aread." -Junot Diaz, author of "The Brief Wondrous Life
of Oscar Wao"
"In the Company of Angels is a novel about grown-ups, people
battered and dinged by life, painfully aware of their own
responsibility, whose understanding of their past never stops
evolving. It's the dignity of their adulthood-the elusive prize at
stake in any midlife crisis-that makes them so admirable and, above
all, so moving."-Laura Miller, "Salon"
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