Pete Hamill

20 years after his last drink Pete Hamill looks back on his early life. As a child during the depression and World War II he learnt that drinking was to be an essential part of being a man, it was only later he discovered its ability to destroy lives.

A Memoir

A Drinking Life

Set in a working-class Brooklyn neighborhood in 1947, this poignant tale revolves around two of the most endearing characters in recent fiction: an 11-year-old Irish Catholic boy named Michael Devlin and Rabbi Judah Hirsch, a refugee from Prague.

Snow in August

In Downtown, Pete Hamill leads us on an unforgettable journey through the city he loves, from the island's southern tip to Times Square, combining a moving memoir of his days and nights in New York with a passionate history of its most enduring places and people.

My Manhattan

Downtown

Thomas Mann

Hermann Hesse

The letters present two great XX century Nobel Prize writers grieving for the ruined world. In the 1930s and 1940s, they rail against the stupidity of war and the cowardice of diplomats, against the social savagery of the Nazis, against the blind forces of abstraction and nationalism. They brood about the fate of Germany and of Europe after the last shots have been fired. They have lived through a time of extraordinary horror and yet they have not surrendered to despair or nihilism. Reading the letters, the reader will feel like some privileged guest in a special room, sitting off to the side somewhere, listening while these men talk.

The Hesse-Mann /Letters

a novel

Tabloid city

For years Jim Delaney has been the neighborhood doctor for the down–and–out people of downtown Manhattan. But even as he cares for others‚ Delaney hides his private grief at the loss of his wife‚ Molly‚ who took a walk to the North River one day — and never came back. Then one day‚ a little boy appears at his doorstep during a blizzard. It's his three–year–old grandson Carlito‚ who has been left by his mother in Delaney's care. Delaney's life will never be the same — and that may be a good thing.

North River

A collection of Brooklyn tales includes the stories of a young boy who transforms the lives of neighborhood toughs, a man who returns to old haunts to avenge a brother's death, and a couple who embrace their memories to ease a diminished future.

And Other Brooklyn Stories

The Christmas Kid

In this unique homage to an American icon, journalist and award-winning author Pete Hamill evokes the essence of Sinatra--examining his art and his legend from the inside, as only a friend of many years could do. Shaped by Prohibition, the Depression, and war, Francis Albert Sinatra became the troubadour of urban loneliness. With his songs, he enabled millions of others to tell their own stories, providing an entire generation with a sense of tradition and pride belonging distinctly to them.

Why Sinatra Matters

In a stately West Village town house, a wealthy socialite and her secretary are murdered. In the 24 hours that follow, a flurry of activity surrounds their shocking deaths: The head of one of the city's last tabloids stops the presses. A cop investigates the killing. A reporter chases the story. A disgraced hedge fund manager flees the country. An Iraq War vet seeks revenge. And an angry young extremist plots a major catastrophe. The City is many things: a proving ground, a decadent carnival, or a palimpsest of memories--a historic metropolis eclipsed by modern times. As much a thriller as it is a gripping portrait of the city of today, Tabloid City is a new fiction classic from the writer who has captured New York perfectly for decades.

A Novel

Tabloid City

From the shores of Ireland, Cormac O'Connor sets out on a fateful journey to avenge the deaths of his parents and honour the code of his ancestors. His quest brings him to the settlement of New York, seething with tensions between English and Irish, whites and blacks, British and Americans, where he is swept up in a tide of conspiracy and violence. In return for aiding an African shaman who was brought to America in chains, Cormac is given an otherworldly gift: he will live forever - as long as he never leaves the island of Manhattan. A writer, a painter, and a man of sensual appetites, Cormac takes part in the dramas of his times through fat years and lean. Through it all, Cormac must fight, generation after generation, a force of evil that returns relentlessly in the scions of a single family. It is a family whose path first crossed his in Ireland and whose persistence puts at risk all his hopes for fulfilling his destiny. As he searches out these blood enemies, he must watch everyone he touches slip away. And so he seeks the mysterious dark lady who alone can free him from the blessing and the curse of his long life.

Forever

Recreating 1930s New York with the vibrancy and rich detail that are his trademarks, Pete Hamill weaves a story of honor, family, and one man's simple courage that no reader will soon forget. It is 1934, and New York City is in the icy grip of the Great Depression. With enormous compassion, Dr. James Delaney tends to his hurt, sick, and poor neighbors, who include gangsters, day laborers, prostitutes, and housewives. If they can't pay, he treats them anyway. But in his own life, Delaney is emotionally numb, haunted by the slaughters of the Great War. His only daughter has left for Mexico, and his wife Molly vanished months before, leaving him to wonder if she is alive or dead. Then, on a snowy New Year's Day, the doctor returns home to find his three-year-old grandson on his doorstep, left by his mother in Delaney's care. Coping with this unexpected arrival, Delaney hires Rose, a tough, decent Sicilian woman with a secret in her past. Slowly, as Rose and the boy begin to care for the good doctor, the numbness in Delaney begins to melt.

Hi-en Montijn

De vriendschap tussen een 11-jarige Ierse katholieke jongen en een rabbijn die de holocaust overleefde, in New York in 1947 wordt bedreigd door een antisemitische jeugdbende.

roman

De golem van Brooklyn

This bestselling memoir from a seasoned New York City reporter is "a vivid report of a journey to the edge of self-destruction" (New York Times). !--StartFragment-- As a child during the Depression and World War II, Pete Hamill learned early that drinking was an essential part of being a man, inseparable from the rituals of celebration, mourning, friendship, romance, and religion. Only later did he discover its ability to destroy any writer's most valuable tools: clarity, consciousness, memory. In A Drinking Life, Hamill explains how alcohol slowly became a part of his life, and how he ultimately left it behind. Along the way, he summons the mood of an America that is gone forever, with the bittersweet fondness of a lifelong New Yorker. !--EndFragment--"Magnificent. A Drinking Life is about growing up and growing old, working and trying to work, within the culture of drink." --Boston Globe

In this "beautifully written, sharply observed, and heartfelt" guide to his hometown (New York Times), legendary New York City journalist Pete Hamill leads us on an unforgettable journey through the city he loves. Walking the Manhattan streets he loves, from Times Square to the island’s southern tip, Pete Hamill combines a moving memoir of his own days and nights in new York with a lively and revealing history of the city’s most enduring places and people. “Pete Hamill lovingly captures the vibrant sights, sounds, and smells of Manhattan from Battery Park to midtown, the most important, most exciting stretch of real estate in the world.” --New York Daily News

This widely acclaimed bestseller is the magical, epic tale of an extraordinary man who arrives in New York in 1740 and remains . . . forever. Through the eyes of Cormac O'Connor -- granted immortality as long as he never leaves the island of Manhattan -- we watch New York grow from a tiny settlement on the tip of an untamed wilderness to the thriving metropolis of today. And through Cormac's remarkable adventures in both love and war, we come to know the city's buried secrets -- the way it has been shaped by greed, race, and waves of immigration, by the unleashing of enormous human energies, and, above all, by hope.

Dirty Laundry

Gay Talese

Literary Nonfiction. Music. Film. Gay Talese and Pete Hamill discuss the life and legacy of Frank Sinatra. "Like his hero, Jay Gatsby, Sinatra 'believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us.' It was that longing for a lost future that so permeated his music and life that gave it an essential quality of longing, loss, and nostalgia."

Gay Talese and Pete Hamill in Conversation

A Century of Sinatra

Short Stories

Tokyo Sketches

It is 1953. The Korean War is ending. The Eisenhower era is beginning. Patti Page and Frankie Laine sit at the top of the charts. And aspiring cartoonist Michael Devlin, Brooklyn born and bred, is heading south to become a man. Pete Hamill's prose has always been praised for its energy and muscularity. But rarely, if ever, has he achieved the tough-and-tender lyricism and imagistic power of his sensual new novel, Loving Women. When Michael arrives at the U.S. Navy supply base in Pensacola, Florida, he is immediately plunged into a world he's never before encountered or imagined. Sensitive, street-smart, but wildly naive about the sadistic terrors of the service and the bigotry of the Deep South, he thrashes through a baptism of frustration and despair - until he meets Eden Santana. Eden is everything he's ever dreamed of: older, wiser, nonplussed by his ingenuous ways - the perfect instructor for a Catholic virgin in the art of lovemaking, in sexual pleasure, confidence and courage. Though their steamy passion is destined to dissipate, there is no way Michael can prepare himself for the circumstances under which his enigmatic lover disappears. Their heartbreaking parting becomes entwined with frightening secrets about each other, the South and the friends they make along the way. As compelling in narrative drive as it is utterly convincing in mood and tone, Loving Women's cinematic immediacy and haunting storytelling signify Pete Hamill writing at the top of his talent.

Loving Women

A biography of the noted Mexican muralist discusses his art, his political ties and beliefs, and his marriage to the painter Frida Kahlo.

Pete Hamill

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