Thomas E. Kennedy

A novel about women, jazz and becoming a writer... That night I told my father I needed to speak to him. I told him that the only thing I wanted to do in the world was to write, that school was driving me crazy, that I had to get away. To get away and write. He looked at me and his strong brown eyes were brimming with sorrow. He said, "You know, son. I always wanted to write. Maybe you should take the chance and do it. Okay.""Okay?" He nodded. "Okay." Now I was really scared. Now I had permission. Sometimes permission is the scariest thing in the world.

A novel about women, jazz and becoming a writer... That night I told my father I needed to speak to him. I told him that the only thing I wanted to do in the world was to write, that school was driving me crazy, that I had to get away. To get away and write. He looked at me and his strong brown eyes were brimming with sorrow. He said, "You know, son. I always wanted to write. Maybe you should take the chance and do it. Okay.""Okay?" He nodded. "Okay." Now I was really scared. Now I had permission. Sometimes permission is the scariest thing in the world.

Our literary travels have taken us to Miami, Prague, the West of Ireland, Bruges/Brugge, Copenhagen, Broughton Castle, Bath, Haut-Koenigsbourg, Stockholm, Danish Prisons, Buonconvento, Paris, London, South Africa, Iceland, the Virgin Islands, and the Isle of Mull. Once there, we walked in the footsteps of Jane Austen, Ernest Hemingway, Fyodor Dostoevsky, James Boswell and Samuel Johnson, Charles Dickens, Virginia Woolf, George Bernard Shaw, William Butler Yeats, Knut Hamsun, Halld r Laxness, Giovanni Boccaccio, William Burroughs, Georges Rodenbach, Heinrich B ll, Hyam Plutzik, Franz Kafka, and many others. These twenty essays reveal our discoveries.

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.

Kerrigan is writing a guidebook to the city of Copenhagen. Specifically, a guide to the city’s drinking establishments – of which there are over 1,500. Thus, it is a project potentially without end, and one with a certain amount of drunken numbness built into it. And that’s the point: for Kerrigan, an American expat fleeing a terrible betrayal, has plenty he wants to forget. The only problem with his proposed project is his research associate, a voluptuous, green-eyed beauty who makes him tremble with forgotten desire. Kerrigan in Copenhagen is both a love story and a Joycean romp through a magical 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, Ren e Ashley, Dan Tur ll, 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

There seems to be no shortage of business at the Tank, a high-profile firm in Copenhagen. There are meetings to attend, memos to write, colleagues to undermine. But when the Tank's nefarious CEO announces a round of downsizing, everyone becomes exponentially more concerned about... whatever it is they're doing. Top executive Frederick Breathwaite is frantically trying to ensure a stable future for his son, while the boy's greatest fear is that his future might resemble his father's absurd present. Meanwhile, Harald Jaeger is lost in amorous fantasies of his female colleagues, but has still managed to catch the CEO's eye - as a possible replacement for Breathwaite...

"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

How much of a survivor, in fact, survives? How much must remain of a survivor for him also to be called a man? You tell me to remember. All over again. To remember. Perhaps there is nothing left there, doctor. Perhaps it is all gone. Bernardo Greene is attempting to rebuild his life. Imprisoned and tortured by Pinochet's regime for introducing his students to political poetry, he has arrived at Copenhagen's centre for rehabilitating torture victims at the age of forty-nine, to begin, to begin again. Across from the King's Garden, Michela Ibsen also seeks a new beginning. She has survived an abusive marriage and the death of a child, but does not know whether this makes her strong, or even whole. Her latest boyfriend is young, vain and dangerously possessive. Why do men hit me? Why is it happening again? Michela's eyes meet Bernardo's over a cup of coffee in the café across the lake. During a long Scandinavian summer of endless days and pin-point nights, these two lost souls begin to heal, to forgive and to trust themselves to love. A novel about passion in the wake of loss, pain in the wake of truth, and salvation in the wake of despair, In the Company of Angels is the mesmeric and quietly devastating masterpiece from internationally celebrated author Thomas E. Kennedy.

Kennedy's 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 artist's 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 Kennedy's 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.