William Kennedy and friends (Photo: New York Writers Institute)

Please join us at 3 p.m. on Friday, February 26, for the “Another Look” Zoom discussion of William Kennedy‘s Billy Phelan’s Greatest Game, the Pulitzer prizewinning novelist’s 1978 novel about a pool hustler and poker player during the 1930s. Kennedy has been called the “Bard of Albany.” Register for the event HERE.

Kennedy began his career as a reporter. After a stint in the military and in Puerto Rico, he returned to his hometown and saw the city of his birth with new eyes: “Without a sense of place, you don’t, as a writer, have very much. Place is all those forces of a given society impinging upon and determining character. Without it, a book becomes bloodless.”

According to Stanford’s Tobias Wolff, who will lead the discussion: “Billy Phelan’s Greatest Game belongs to William Kennedy’s celebrated Albany sequence of novels. Set during the Depression, it concerns a young gambler and bookie, the Billy of the title, who suffers a setback that compels him to embark on an odyssey – and I use that word advisedly – through the demimonde of his city, during which he encounters temptations and dangers that test his resolve to the limit. There are gangsters, there is a kidnapping, but at its core this novel is about character, and what this man will do and endure to preserve his honor.”

The discussion will be lead by National Medal of Arts winner Tobias Wolff, with panelists Carol Edgarian, novelist and founding editor of Narrative Magazine; and Robert Pogue Harrison,

As many of you recall, this event was originally scheduled for April 7, but cancelled because of COVID. The rescheduled event marks Another Look’s triumph over adversity.

Please join us in celebrating with this special event – our second Zoom get-together, and only the second time we have featured a living writer. You can read Cynthia Haven‘s Q&A interview with Bill Kennedy over at The Los Angeles Review of Books here.

Again, register for the event here.