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Author Skype visit at library's discussion group on June 5

"Lillian Boxfish takes a walk" by Kathleen Rooney

The library's book discussion club will have a Skype visit by author Kathleen Rooney as part of their discussion of "Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk" on Wednesday, June 5 at noon. This discussion, open to the public, will be held in the lower level meeting room at the library.

Some copies of each month's book selection are available for checkout previous to each book discussion. The group meets the first Wednesday of every month.

Synopsis
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.

About the author
Kathleen Rooney is a founding editor of Rose Metal Press, a nonprofit publisher of literary work in hybrid genres, as well as a founding member of Poems While You Wait, a team of poets and their typewriters who compose commissioned poetry on demand. She teaches in the English Department at DePaul University, and her most recent books include the national best-seller, Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk (St. Martin’s Press 2017 / Picador 2018) and The Listening Room: A Novel of Georgette and Loulou Magritte (Spork Press, 2018).

Upcoming books
July 10 -  Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi
August -  The Bridge Ladies by Betsey Lerner
September -  The Huntress by Kate Quinn *Author Skype Visit*
October 2 -  These is My Words by Nancy Turner 
November 6 -  Whiskey When We’re Dry by John Larison
December 4 -  Love and Other Consolation Prizes by Jamie Ford
January 8 -  Snow Child by Eowyn Ivey

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