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"