An Albany Trio

“Kennedy's justly acclaimed Albany Cycle [is] one of the imperishable products of American literature since the Second World War. These books can be read singly or in sequence, but read they must be. Kennedy is one of our necessary writers.”—GQ Legs inaugurated William Kennedy’s celebrated cycle of novels set in Albany, New York. True to both life and myth. Legs evokes the flamboyant career of the legendary gangster Jack “Legs” Diamond, who was finally murdered in Albany, and his showgirl mistress as they blaze a trail across the tabloid pages of the 1920s and 1930s. The second novel in the Albany cycle depicts Billy Phelan, a slightly tarnished poker player, pool hustler, and small-time bookie, as he moves through the lurid nighttime glare of a tough Depression-era town. Full of Irish pluck, he works the fringes of Albany sporting life with his own particular style—until he falls from underworld grace. In the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Ironweed, Francis Phelan, ex-ballplayer, part-time gravedigger, and full-time drunk, has hit bottom. Years ago he left Albany after killing a scab during a workers’ strike, and again after he accidentally—and fatally—dropped his infant son. Now, in 1938, Francis is back, roaming familiar streets and trying to make peace with ghosts of the past and present. William Kennedy’s Albany Cycle of novels reflect what he once described as the fusion of his imagination with a single place. A native and longtime resident of Albany, New York, his work moves from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, chronicling family life, the city’s netherworld, and its spheres of power—financial, ethnic, political—often among the Irish-Americans who dominated the city in this period. The novels in his cycle include, Legs, Billy Phelan’s Greatest Game, Ironweed, Quinn’s Book, Very Old Bones, The Flaming Corsage, and Roscoe.

The second novel in William Kennedy’s much-loved Albany cycle depicts Billy Phelan, a slightly tarnished poker player, pool hustler, and small-time bookie. A resourceful man full of Irish pluck, Billy works the fringes of the Albany sporting life with his own particular style and private code of honor, until he finds himself in the dangerous position of potential go-between in the kidnapping of a political boss’s son.

The beloved Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, basis of the film starring Jack Nicholson and Meryl Streep. Francis Phelan, ex-big-leaguer, part-time gravedigger, full-time bum with the gift of gab, is back in town. He left Albany twenty-two years earlier after he dropped his infant son accidentally, and the boy died. Now he's on the way back to the wife and home he abandoned, haunted at every corner by the ghosts of his violent life. Francis; his wino ladyfriend of nine years, Helen; and his stumblebum pal, Rudy, shuffle their ragtag way through the city's bleakest streets, surviving on gumption, muscatel, and black wit. estiny is not their business. 'The premise of Ironweed was so unpromising, that in marketing terms the writer still to this day finds it funny: the story of a bunch of itinerant alcoholics, knocking around Kennedy's hometown, falling out, having visions, trying to pass for sober to cadge a bed for the night in the homeless shelter.' Guardian 'But for all the rich variety of prose and event, from hallucination to bedrock realism to slapstick and to blessed quotidian peace, ''Ironweed'' is more austere than its predecessors. It is more fierce, but also more forgiving.' Quoted from the classic New York Times review of Ironweed, which made it an overnight sensation.

Legs, the inaugural book in William Kennedy’s acclaimed Albany cycle of novels, brilliantly evokes the flamboyant career of gangster Jack “Legs” Diamond. Through the equivocal eyes of Diamond’s attorney, Marcus Gorman (who scraps a promising political career for the more elemental excitement of the criminal underworld), we watch as Legs and his showgirl mistress, Kiki Roberts, blaze their gaudy trail across the tabloid pages of the 1920s and 1930s.

From the moment he rescues the beautiful, passionate Maud Fallon from the icy waters of the Hudson one wintry day in 1849, Daniel Quinn is thrust into a bewildering, adventure-filled journey through the tumult of nineteenth-century America. As he quests after the beguiling and elusive Maud, Daniel will witness the rise and fall of great dynasties in upstate New York, epochal prize fights, exotic life in the theatre, visitations from spirits beyond the grave, horrific battles between Irish immigrants and the "Know-Nothings," vicious New York draft riots, heroic passages through the Underground Railroad, and the bloody despair of the Civil War. Filled with Dickensian characters, a vivid sense of history, and a marvellously inventive humor, Quinn's Bookis an engaging delight by an acclaimed modern master.

“Thick with crime, passion, and backroom banter” (The New Yorker), Roscoe is an odyssey of great scope and linguistic verve, a deadly, comic masterpiece from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Ironweed It's V-J Day, the war is over, and Roscoe Conway, after twenty-six years as the second in command of Albany's notorious political machine, decides to quit politics forever. But there's no way out, and only his Machiavellian imagination can help him cope with the erupting disasters. Every step leads back to the past—to the early loss of his true love, the takeover of city hall, the machine's fight with FDR and Al Smith to elect a governor, and the methodical assassination of gangster Jack "Legs" Diamond. William Kennedy’s Albany Cycle of novels reflect what he once described as the fusion of his imagination with a single place. A native and longtime resident of Albany, New York, his work moves from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, chronicling family life, the city’s netherworld, and its spheres of power—financial, ethnic, political—often among the Irish-Americans who dominated the city in this period. The novels in his cycle include, Legs, Billy Phelan’s Greatest Game, Ironweed, Quinn’s Book, Very Old Bones, The Flaming Corsage, and Roscoe.

Wise beyond her years and hip to the unpredictable ways of life at all too early an age, A.J. Albany guides us through dope and deviance of the late 1960s and early 1970s in Hollywood shadowy underbelly and beyond. A. J. Albany's recollection of life with her father, the great jazz pianist Joe Albany, is the story of one girl's unsentimental education. Joe played with the likes of Charles Mingus, Lester Young, and Charlie Parker, but between gigs he slipped into drug-induced obscurity. It was during these times that his daughter knew him best. After her mother disappeared, six-year-old Amy Jo and her charming, troubled father set up housekeeping in a seamy Hollywood hotel. While Joe finished a set in some red-boothed dive, chances were you'd find Amy curled up to sleep on someone's fur coat, clutching a 78 of Louis Armstrong's "Sugar Blues" or, later, a photograph of the man himself, inscribed, "To little Amy Jo, always in love with you--Pops." Wise beyond her years and hip to the unpredictable ways of Old Lady Life at all too early an age, A. J. Albany guides us through the dope and deviance of the late 1960s and early 1970s in Hollywood's shadowy underbelly and beyond. What emerges is a raw, gripping, and surprisingly sympathetic portrait of a young girl trying to survive among the outcasts, misfits, and artists who surrounded her.

Francis Phelan is, alongside 'Legs' Diamond, William Kennedy's greatest character. Ex-ball player, latterly a bum, lush and hardcase, he is central to these three Albany novels: father to the pool shark Billy who struggles with his legacy of violence and self-glorification (BILLY PHELAN'S GREATEST GAME); brother to artist Peter whose paintings explore the dark corners of his family history, including Francis's life (VERY OLD BONES); and antihero of Pulitzer Prize winning IRONWEED, in which Phelan returns to Albany at the end of the Depression, roaming the familiar streets with his hobo pal Helen, trying to make peace with the ghosts of the past and present.

In a Manhattan hotel room, the "Love Nest Killings of 1908" take place. But the mystery of who killed whom, and why, does not unravel until we explore the lives of Katrina Taylor and Edward Daughtery. He is a first-generation Irish American and a successful playwright. She is a high-born Protestant, a beautiful seductive woman with complex attitudes towards life. Their marriage is a passionate one, but a cataclysmic hotel fire changes it into something else altogether. Moving back and forth between the 1880s and 1912, The Flaming Corsagefollows Katrina and Edward as other lives impact upon theirs-their socially opposed families; Edward's flirtatious actress paramour, Melissa Spencer; the physician Giles Fitzroy, and his wife; and Edward's friend, the cynical journalist Thomas Maginn. The Flaming Corsageevocatively portrays through the lens of Albany's robust Irishtown and English-Dutch aristocracy the seething, contradictory impulses of our humanity, lusts and furies that know no bounds of time or place.

The inside story of one of the country's most secretive and misruled statehouses by a former New York State senator;. "Democracy takes decades to take root and flourish. New York is learning that it takes just three men in a room to maim and seriously harm a vigorous and representative system of government."-from Three Men in a Room It might be a scene from a movie: three powerful and secretive men sit in a private corner of an exclusive New York club, imperiously making decisions that affect the lives of millions of people. But the scene takes place in Albany, New York, and the exclusive members are the governor, the senate majority leader, and the speaker of the assembly of the New York State legislature. Three Men in a Room is an insider's exposé of how one of the country's largest and most powerful governments-with the fourth-largest budget, behind only the federal government's, California's, and Texas's-has become a model of corrupt, inefficient, and undemocratic governance. Seymour Lachman ran the New York City Board of Education, taught political science, and was then elected to New York's legislature. What he found when he arrived in the halls of the state senate was a Potemkin village of government where legislators vote on bills they haven't read during legislative sessions they haven't attended. After four terms, Lachman left his safe seat in disgust, and has now written this sharp, mordant, and impassioned call for reform. Although Lachman's story takes place in one of the country's most progressive states, the problems described in this book are rampant in statehouses throughout the country.