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Winter Tales: Men Write about Aging
Nobel Prize winner Mario Vargas Llosa, Pulitzer Prize winners Norman Mailer and Stephen Dunn, Poets Laureate Robert Pinsky and Billy Collins, National Book Critics Circle Award winners Albert Goldbarth and Jack Marshall, and twenty-three other notable authors are in Winter Tales: Men Write about Aging, an engaging collection of poems, essays and illustrations from professional writers and artists expressing their thoughts on the subject of aging. Their views are filled with insight, wisdom and humor, riveting accounts that may make you sad, or make you happy, perhaps even giddy, perhaps wiser, and certainly contemplative. You may see yourself and others you know who are in the same predicament. You might find yourself smiling wryly and even laughing at times. This is a bright book of life, not death, which these wonderful (at times brilliant) artists have created. Winter Tales is a timely book, given our country’s aging population of boomers who will take comfort in knowing they are not alone when it comes to dealing with what aging is doing to their minds and bodies. Take and read. Join the camaraderie. Welcome aboard.
Editors: Duff Brenna, Thomas E. Kennedy
Paperback : 262 pages
ISBN-10 : 0983828903
ISBN-13 : 978-0983828907
About the Author
Duff Brenna is the author of nine books, including The Book of Mamie, which won the AWP Award for Best Novel; The Holy Book of the Beard, named “an underground classic” by The New York Times; Too Cool, a New York Times Noteworthy Book; The Altar of the Body, given the Editors Prize Favorite Book of the Year Award, South Florida Sun-Sentinel, and also received a San Diego Writers Association Award for Best Novel 2002. He is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts award, Milwaukee Magazine’s Best Short Story of the Year Award, and a Pushcart Prize Honorable Mention. His work has been translated into six languages.
About the Author
Thomas E. Kennedy’s 25 plus books include the four novels of the Copenhagen Quartet—most recently, In the Company of Angels (Bloomsbury, 2010) and Falling Sideways (Bloomsbury 2011)—and a novel-in-essays Last Night My Bed a Boat of Whiskey Going Down (New American Press (2010). His stories, essays, and translations appear regularly in American periodicals and have won Pushcart, O. Henry, and National Magazine awards. He lives in Copenhagen and teaches in the low-residency MFA Program of Fairleigh Dickinson University.
Excerpts
“… the Church exasperates me as much as a basketball game.” — Mario Vargas Llosa, Nobel Laureate 2010
“When I’m walking and feeling pain in the knees, I feel pretty good about it because I feel like I’m paying off my bad karma on the installment plan.” — Norman Mailer
“The body, as Richard Pryor put it (or was it Ali?), should sue these legs for non-support.” — Gordon Weaver
“I have what in layman terms is called an addictive personality, and what I do, basically, is transfer my addiction from booze and dope to the healthier obsession of pumping iron.” — James Brown
“We lose touch, and we try to re-establish touch, but often when we reach out our hands find only emptiness.” — Victor Rangel-Ribeiro
“And so all of my male friends my age/were almost as anxious waiting / for the report on my prostate biopsy / … I was their crystal ball, / their tea leaves.”— Albert Goldbarth
“Aging face in a mirror / Silvered with years is covering / A child’s heart” — Jack Marshall
“Take heed you who read this / & drop to your knees now & again … & kiss the earth & be joyful” — Steve Kowit
“Screw the wizard of finality.” — George Dickerson
“When I awakened, already fifty, / my hands were tangles of old line …” — Jack Driscoll
The forgetting I notice most as I get older is really a form of memory — Robert Pinsky
"I admire [Serving House Books] for the quality work they’re putting out plus the notable writers they’re publishing."
Jack Smith, The Writer Magazine