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St. Martin's Press
January 2017
On Sale: January 17, 2017
Featuring: Lillian Boxfish
304 pages ISBN: 1250113326 EAN: 9781250113320 Hardcover
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Fiction Women's Fiction
“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
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