Frank Conroy Books In Order

Novels

  1. Body & Soul (1993)

Collections

  1. Midair (1985)

Anthologies edited

  1. The Iowa Award (1991)

Non fiction

  1. Stop – Time (1967)
  2. The Eleventh Draft (1999)
  3. Dogs Bark, But the Caravan Rolls On (2002)
  4. Time & Tide (2004)

Novels Book Covers

Collections Book Covers

Anthologies edited Book Covers

Non fiction Book Covers

Frank Conroy Books Overview

Body & Soul

In the dim light of a baseme*nt 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.

Midair

The title story in this collection narrates the lifelong effects on a son of the trauma experienced when his psychotic father threatens to drop him from a fifth floor window. A common thread running through the eight stories is a man’s growing awareness of the world around him.

The Iowa Award

According to the New York Times Book Review, the Iowa Short Fiction Award is among the most prestigious literary prizes America offers, and the Chicago Tribune has called the honor a respected prize that annually introduces readers to a writer whose work is little known outside the circle of literary magazine and university publications. In 1991, to both celebrate the stories discovered by the Iowa Short Fiction Award and its companion, the John Simmons Short Fiction Award, and to further acquaint readers with the prize winning authors, Frank Conroy compiled The Iowa Award: The Best Stories from Twenty Years. He follows that now with The Iowa Award: The Best Stories, 1991 2000, a collection of twenty one winning selections. Whether hurtling toward Earth in a disabled airplane, sharing silence with a prostitute, fantasizing about the Manson family, or hiding disgust for a dying friend, the characters in this new collection engage and captivate readers. The authors from 1991 winners Elizabeth Harris and Sondra Spatt Olsen to newcomers John McNally and Elizabeth Oness explore the nuances of love, lust, youth, old age, illness, nostalgia, obsession, idiosyncrasy, and surprise. Their work judged by such accomplished writers as Ethan Canin, Francine Prose, Ann Beattie, and Stuart Dybek and the selections Conroy has chosen to share exemplify remarkable writing. Moreover, each writer achieves the expectations of the Iowa Short Fiction Award, established in 1969 to provide a forum for the publication of a uniquely American literary form. IOWA SHORT FICTION AWARD WINNERS, 1991 2000 David Borofka Mark Brazaitis Kathryn Chetkovich Tereze Gl&uumlck Ann Harleman Elizabeth Harris Jim Henry Lisa Lenzo John McNally Ren e Manfredi Susan Onthank Mates Rod Val Moore Thisbe Nissen Sondra Spatt Olsen Elizabeth Oness Nancy Reisman Elizabeth Searle Enid Shomer Lex Williford Charles Wyatt Don Zancanella

Stop – Time

First published in 1967, this is an autobiography that is a memoir of boyhood and adolescence. Beginning with a lesson in brutality at a progressive boarding school, the book moves to a self help settlement in Florida, a Connecticut mental hospital where Conroy’s mother and stepfather are wardens, and to New York City where he survives by his wits in schools, at jobs, and even more dangerously at home. Then, after his mother leaves for Europe and his stepfather installs an insane mistress in the family’s apartment, Conroy runs away, embarking on new adventures.

Dogs Bark, But the Caravan Rolls On

For thirty years, Frank Conroy’s commentaries on life, music, and writing have appeared regularly in the New York Times Magazine, Harper’s Magazine, Esquire, and GQ. Dogs Bark, But the Caravan Rolls On collects these pieces into an autobiography in journalistic snapshots. They evoke Conroy’s southern childhood, his teen years in New York as a truant hanging out at pool halls and Harlem jazz clubs, his first glimmers of the power of language and the writing life in college, his romantic life, and his experiences as a teacher and as director of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Here, too, are profiles of the musicians he has come to know and jammed with: Keith Jarrett, Wynton Marsalis, Peter Serkin, even the Rolling Stones. New essays fill out the collection from Conroy’s wry retrospective viewpoint. Dogs Bark, But the Caravan Rolls On is imbued with the honesty, humor, and insight that made his memoir STOP TIME a classic.

Time & Tide

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.

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