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Very Old Bones

Author William Kennedy
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Paperback
$23.00 US
| $30.99 CAN
Penguin Adult HC/TR | Penguin Books
On sale Apr 01, 1993 | 304 Pages | 9780140138986
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Riding on the melody of its language and the power of its story, Very Old Bones is a climatic work in the Albany Cycle from the Pultizer Prize-winning author of Ironweed

It is 1958 and the Phelan clan has gathered to hear Peter Phelan's will. Peter was an artist whose paintings about members of the family have given him belated critical recognition. The paintings illuminate the lives of his brother Francis (the exiled hero of Ironweed), and a family ancestor, Malachi McIlhenny, a true madman beset by demons, and determined to send them back to hell.

Orson Purcell, bastard son of Peter, encounters his first true solace through this obsessive and close-knit family he has never quite entered. It is through Orson's modern eye that we see the tragedies, obsessions, and clandestine joys of the singular Phelan family.



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.
Praise for Very Old Bones

“An immensely gratifying novel...With its dialogue as chillingly perceptive as its family insights, this novel has about it a crisp, authoritative ease-as though the truth were just hiding there on the outskirts of Albany, waiting to be brought home, and Kennedy obliged.”—The Boston Globe 

“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

“Kennedy succeeds admirably in shuttling his narrative voice between present and past and weaving a cloth in which history and myth are indistinguishable....Few Irish-American writers have produced more haunting portraits of their ancestors or the ghosts that possessed them than Kennedy has in Very Old Bones.”—The New York Times

“Kennedy's novels have the rough feel of stories told, not of chap­ters written and artfully polished. His beguiling yarns are the kind of family myths embellished and retold across a kitchen table late at night, whiskified, raunchy, darkly funny, tangles of old resent­ments and fresh exasperations.”—TIME

“Very Old Bones deals with the artistic process, with the difficulties of romantic love, with the astonishing twists and turns that an indi­vidual life can take, but its most important truths concern the ways that our individual destinies are linked to our ancestral past.”—USA Today

“This is a novel of brilliant speeches and innovative, ambitious plotting....Above all, this is the sound and sense of a fiction writer very much working with a poet's ear and heart. Kennedy's prose is swift and glib, intent upon creating sparks and surprises, and fully open to life's magical touches, its haunts and ghostly discoveries.”—Chicago Sun-Times

“With remarkable tenderness, yet without a hint of sentimentality, both [Very Old Bones and Ironweed] delineate family and commu­nity ties, portray the spiritually needy, and evoke the grimmest and grubbiest of lives while convincingly suggesting the possibility of redemption.”—The Washington Post
William Kennedy, author, screenwriter and playwright, was born and raised in Albany, New York. Kennedy brought his native city to literary life in many of his works. The Albany cycle, includes Legs, Billy Phelan's Greatest Game, and the Pulitzer Prize winning Ironweed.The versatile Kennedy wrote the screenplay for Ironweed, the play Grand View, and cowrote the screenplay for the The Cotton Club with Francis Ford Coppola. Kennedy also wrote the nonfiction O Albany! and Riding the Yellow Trolley Car. Some of the other works he is known for include Roscoe and Very Old Bones.

Kennedy is the founding director of the New York State Writers Institute and, in 1993, was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He has received numerous literary awards, including the Literary Lions Award from the New York Public Library, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and a Governor’s Arts Award. Kennedy was also named Commander of the Order of Arts and Letters in France and a member of the board of directors of the New York State Council for the Humanities. View titles by William Kennedy

About

Riding on the melody of its language and the power of its story, Very Old Bones is a climatic work in the Albany Cycle from the Pultizer Prize-winning author of Ironweed

It is 1958 and the Phelan clan has gathered to hear Peter Phelan's will. Peter was an artist whose paintings about members of the family have given him belated critical recognition. The paintings illuminate the lives of his brother Francis (the exiled hero of Ironweed), and a family ancestor, Malachi McIlhenny, a true madman beset by demons, and determined to send them back to hell.

Orson Purcell, bastard son of Peter, encounters his first true solace through this obsessive and close-knit family he has never quite entered. It is through Orson's modern eye that we see the tragedies, obsessions, and clandestine joys of the singular Phelan family.



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.

Reviews

Praise for Very Old Bones

“An immensely gratifying novel...With its dialogue as chillingly perceptive as its family insights, this novel has about it a crisp, authoritative ease-as though the truth were just hiding there on the outskirts of Albany, waiting to be brought home, and Kennedy obliged.”—The Boston Globe 

“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

“Kennedy succeeds admirably in shuttling his narrative voice between present and past and weaving a cloth in which history and myth are indistinguishable....Few Irish-American writers have produced more haunting portraits of their ancestors or the ghosts that possessed them than Kennedy has in Very Old Bones.”—The New York Times

“Kennedy's novels have the rough feel of stories told, not of chap­ters written and artfully polished. His beguiling yarns are the kind of family myths embellished and retold across a kitchen table late at night, whiskified, raunchy, darkly funny, tangles of old resent­ments and fresh exasperations.”—TIME

“Very Old Bones deals with the artistic process, with the difficulties of romantic love, with the astonishing twists and turns that an indi­vidual life can take, but its most important truths concern the ways that our individual destinies are linked to our ancestral past.”—USA Today

“This is a novel of brilliant speeches and innovative, ambitious plotting....Above all, this is the sound and sense of a fiction writer very much working with a poet's ear and heart. Kennedy's prose is swift and glib, intent upon creating sparks and surprises, and fully open to life's magical touches, its haunts and ghostly discoveries.”—Chicago Sun-Times

“With remarkable tenderness, yet without a hint of sentimentality, both [Very Old Bones and Ironweed] delineate family and commu­nity ties, portray the spiritually needy, and evoke the grimmest and grubbiest of lives while convincingly suggesting the possibility of redemption.”—The Washington Post

Author

William Kennedy, author, screenwriter and playwright, was born and raised in Albany, New York. Kennedy brought his native city to literary life in many of his works. The Albany cycle, includes Legs, Billy Phelan's Greatest Game, and the Pulitzer Prize winning Ironweed.The versatile Kennedy wrote the screenplay for Ironweed, the play Grand View, and cowrote the screenplay for the The Cotton Club with Francis Ford Coppola. Kennedy also wrote the nonfiction O Albany! and Riding the Yellow Trolley Car. Some of the other works he is known for include Roscoe and Very Old Bones.

Kennedy is the founding director of the New York State Writers Institute and, in 1993, was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He has received numerous literary awards, including the Literary Lions Award from the New York Public Library, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and a Governor’s Arts Award. Kennedy was also named Commander of the Order of Arts and Letters in France and a member of the board of directors of the New York State Council for the Humanities. View titles by William Kennedy

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