'Irresistible.funny and touching.This witty and heartfelt ode to a city, to its infinite variety, to its melting pot of citizens not only enchants but offers an important lesson: that human connections and work are what give life meaning.' - Boston Globe For now, after all, the night is still young.Ī NATIONAL INDIE BESTSELLER Powell's Best Books of 2017

Lillian figures she might as well take her time. 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.Ī 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. 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. 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 was a job that, she says, 'in some ways saved my life, and in other ways ruined it.' Macy's to become the highest paid advertising woman in the country.

She took 1930s New York by storm, working her way up writing copy for R.H. 'In my reckless and undiscouraged youth,' Lillian Boxfish writes, 'I worked in a walnut-paneled office thirteen floors above West Thirty-Fifth Street.' Effervescent with verve, wit, and heart, Rooney's nimble novel celebrates insouciance, creativity, chance, and valor.' - Booklist (starred review) 'Rooney's delectably theatrical fictionalization is laced with strands of tart poetry and emulates the dark sparkle of Dorothy Parker, Edna St. ' 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. 'Prescient and quick.A perfect fusing of subject and writer, idea and ideal.' - Chicago Tribune

'Transporting.witty, poignant and sparkling.' - People (People Picks Book of the Week)

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