Albany Trio

<b>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.--<i>GQ</i></b> <p/> <i>Legs</i> inaugurated William Kennedy's celebrated cycle of novels set in Albany New York. True to both life and myth. <i>Legs</i> evokes the flamboyant career of the legendary gangster Jack Legs Diamond who was finally murdered in Albany and his showgirl mistress as they blaze a trail across the tabloid pages of the 1920s and 1930s. <p/> The second novel in the Albany cycle depicts Billy Phelan a slightly tarnished poker player pool hustler and small-time bookie as he moves through the lurid nighttime glare of a tough Depression-era town. Full of Irish pluck he works the fringes of Albany sporting life with his own particular style--until he falls from underworld grace. <p/> In the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel <i>Ironweed</i> Francis Phelan ex-ballplayer part-time gravedigger and full-time drunk has hit bottom. Years ago he left Albany after killing a scab during a workers' strike and again after he accidentally--and fatally--dropped his infant son. Now in 1938 Francis is back roaming familiar streets and trying to make peace with ghosts of the past and present. <p/><br><b>William Kennedy's Albany Cycle</b> 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 <i>Legs</i> <i>Billy Phelan's Greatest Game</i> <i>Ironweed</i> <i>Quinn's Book</i> <i>Very Old Bones</i> <i>The Flaming Corsage</i> and <i>Roscoe</i>.