The Christmas Kid: And Other Brooklyn Stories
Pete Hamill
Language: English
Pages: 304
ISBN: 0316232742
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
"Hamill, a master raconteur, mines his own roots in this enchanting new anthology." ---New York Times
Pete Hamill's collected stories about Brooklyn present a New York almost lost but not forgotten. They read like messages from a vanished age, brimming with nostalgia---for the world after the war, the days of the Dodgers and Giants, and even, for some, the years of Prohibition and the Depression.
THE CHRISTMAS KID is vintage Hamill. Set in the borough where he was born and raised, it is a must-read for his many fans, for all who love New York, and for anyone who seeks to understand the world today through the lens of the world that once was.
conductor’s booth, reading a newspaper, when his eyes briefly wandered and came to rest on the face of a young woman. She was sitting facing him, reading a book called And Quiet Flows the Don. In his twenty-two winters on the earth, Hugo had never seen anyone quite like her. “It wasn’t just her face,” he told me when I went to visit him many years later. “I mean, her face was amazing. Shaped like an oval, high cheekbones, clear skin, a great straight perfect nose… It was more than that. She
couple of cool older dudes in sport shirts. They were laughing. III The trouble started around Labor Day weekend, and it all came from Nora McCarthy. She lived up the block from Rattigan’s, almost directly across 11th Street from Barney Augstein’s house. She was in her forties, a large, box-shaped woman with horn-rimmed glasses, and she was awful. Everybody’s business was her business, and when she wasn’t working at the Youth Board, a job she’d received from the Regular Democratic Club, she was
station. She would be finished in twenty minutes. He parked across the street, listening to the radio show, and smoked a cigarette. At five minutes to three, he locked the car door and walked to the station entrance. Beyond the locked double door, there was a long empty corridor leading to a bank of elevators. A security guard sat in a chair beside the elevators, reading a newspaper. Tommy Mungo waited. A taxi pulled up and double-parked, the off-duty sign burning. Then a large man and a
Family,” do you think Joe Tooks got what he deserved? Why or why not? In “Wishes,” in what ways has Uncle Roy’s accident altered the course of his life? Do you think things will change for Uncle Roy, or is he already too set in his ways? Based on his nostalgia, do you think he has regrets about the year 1949? Is there a year in your life that you feel particularly nostalgic for? Like Hugo in “The Love of His Life,” do you believe in love at first sight? Why or why not? What do you think happened
dying flowers and the ruined candles. “The poor boy,” his mother said. “The poor little boy.” In the afternoon of his second day home, Eddie Devlin went off to Prospect Park, to look at the place where they’d found Liam’s body. He stood for a long time in a grove of ice-polished trees and knew what he had to do. It began to snow. They found Joe Tooks two days later, under deep snow in the backyard of his apartment house. He was not pretty to look at. His elbows had been shot off. His left knee