Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk -- Kathleen Rooney

<p><b>NOW A NATIONAL INDIE BESTSELLER</b> <p/> <b>A love letter to city life in all its guts and grandeur, <i>Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk</i> by Kathleen Rooney paints a portrait of a remarkable woman across the canvas of a changing America: from the Jazz Age to the onset of the AIDS epidemic; the Great Depression to the birth of hip-hop.</b> <p/> <i>"In my reckless and undiscouraged youth," </i>Lillian Boxfish writes, <i> "I worked in a walnut-paneled office thirteen floors above West Thirty-Fifth Street..."</i> <p/> She took 1930s New York by storm, working her way up writing copy for R.H. Macy's to become the highest paid advertising woman in the country. It was a job that, she says, "in some ways saved my life, and in other ways ruined it." <p/> Now it's the last night of 1984 and Lillian, 85 years old but just as sharp and savvy as ever, is on her way to a party. It's chilly enough out for her mink coat and Manhattan is grittier now--her son keeps warning her about a subway vigilante on the prowl--but the quick-tongued poetess has never been one to scare easily. On a walk that takes her over 10 miles around the city, she meets bartenders, bodega clerks, security guards, criminals, children, parents, and parents-to-be, while reviewing a life of excitement and adversity, passion and heartbreak, illuminating all the ways New York has changed--and has not. <p/> Lillian figures she might as well take her time. For now, after all, the night is still young. <p/>"Transporting.