Frank Conroy

Claude Rawlings, a poverty-stricken young man, feels stymied by life, until he finds an old piano and embarks on a musical odyssey that takes him into a world of wealth, power, and fame

Body & Soul

'Stop-Time' is a memoir of boyhood and adolescence unlike any other. Beginning with a lesson in brutality at a progressive boarding school, it moves to a self-help settlement in Florida, to a Connecticut mental home (where Conroy's mother and stepfather are wardens), and to New York City (where Conroy survives by his wits in school, at jobs, and even more dangerously at home). Then, after his mother leaves for Europe ... Conroy runs away, embarking on new, and even stranger adventures.

Stop-time

The present-day director of the Iowa Writer's Workshop, Frank Conroy invites 23 former professors and students of the workshop to pen essays on their craft

Craft and the Writing Life from the Iowa Writers' Workshop

The Eleventh Draft

The Best Stories from Twenty Years

The Iowa Award

Body and Soul

Corps Et AME

Now available in trade paperback, Frank Conroy's acclaimed novel of a young man with an extraordinary talent had critics and readers alike agreeing that Conroy's "Body and Soul" is a masterpiece. In the dim light of a basement apartment, six-year-old Claude Rawlings sits at an old white piano, picking out the sounds he has heard on the radio and shutting out the reality of his lonely world. The setting is 1940s New York, a city that is "long gone, replaced by another city of the same name". Against a backdrop that pulses with sound and rhythm, Body & Soul brilliantly evokes the life of a child prodigy whose musical genius pulls him out of squalor and into the drawing rooms of the rich and a gilt-edged marriage. But the same talent that transforms him also hurtles Claude into a lonely world of obsession and relentless ambition. From Carnegie Hall to the smoky jazz clubs of London, Body & Soul burns with passion and truth -- at once a riveting, compulsive read and a breathtaking glimpse into a boy's heart and an artist's soul.

Frank Conroy first visited Nantucket with a gang of college friends in 1955. They came on a whim, and for Conroy it was the beginning of a lifelong love affair with this "small, relaxed oasis in the ocean." This book, part travel diary, part memoir, is a hauntingly evocative and personal journey through Nantucket: its sweeping dunes, rugged moors, remote beaches, secret fishing spots, and hidden forests and cranberry bogs. Admirers of Conroy’s classic and acclaimed memoir Stop-Time will again delight in what James Atlas, writing in the New York Times, called his "genius for close observation." In Time and Tide, Conroy recounts the island’s history from the glory days of the whaling boom to the present, when tourism dominates. He vividly evokes the clash of cultures between the working class and the super-rich, with the fragile ecology of the island always in the balance. But most fascinating of all, he tells his own story--of playing jazz piano in the island’s bars; of raising a barn in the early '60s with the help of a bunch of hippie carpenters; of leasing an old, failed bar with two island pals and turning it into the Roadhouse, a club "that was to be ours, the year-rounders, and to hell with the summer people." There’s a marvelous story of his first golf game, played on an ancient nine-hole course with two friends, a part-time sommelier and a builder from the South who invented the one-handed pepper mill. This is a book that revels in friendship, music, history, and the gorgeous landscape of a unique American place, and is a wonderful work by one of our greatest contemporary writers.

A Walk Through Nantucket

Time and Tide

Corps et âme. L'enfant prodige

A lyrical portrait of Nantucket as experienced by the author during a summer job in 1955 is complemented by a vivid recounting of the island's history and the author's memories of getting to know the area and subsequently building a small house on the oceanfront. 40,000 first printing.

Frank Conroy

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