By turns, an elegy, a celebration, and a social history, The Last Fine Time is a tour de force of lyrical style. Verlyn Klinkenborg chronicles the life of a family-owned restaurant in Buffalo, New York, from its days as a prewar Polish tavern to its reincarnation as George &amp; Eddie's, a swank nightspot serving highballs and French-fried shrimp to a generation of optimistic and prosperous Americans. In the inevitable dimming of the neon sign outside the restaurant, we see both the passing of an old world way of life and the end to the postwar exuberance that was Eddie Wenzek's "last fine time."

The Last Fine Time

Biographies & Memoirs

Klinkenborg, Verlyn

Professionals & Academics

University of Chicago Press

Most of what you think you know about writing is useless. It’s the harmful debris of your education—a mixture of half-truths, myths, and false assumptions that prevents you from writing well. Drawing on years of experience as a writer and teacher of writing, Verlyn Klinkenborg offers an approach to writing that will change the way you work and think. There is no gospel, no orthodoxy, no dogma in this book. What you’ll find here isn’t the way to write. Instead, you’ll find a way to clear your mind of illusions about writing and discover how you write. Several Short Sentences About Writing is a book of first steps and experiments. They will revolutionize the way you think and perceive, and they will change forever the sense of your own authority as a writer. This is a book full of learning, but it’s also a book full of unlearning—a way to recover the vivid, rhythmic, poetic sense of language you once possessed. An indispensable and unique book that will give you a clear understanding of how to think about what you do when you write and how to improve the quality of your writing.

Several Short Sentences About Writing

Reference

Words, Language & Grammar

KNOPF

An indispensable and distinctive book that will help anyone who wants to write, write better, or have a clearer understanding of what it means for them to be writing, from widely admired writer and teacher Verlyn Klinkenborg. Klinkenborg believes that most of our received wisdom about how writing works is not only wrong but an obstacle to our ability to write. In Several Short Sentences About Writing, he sets out to help us unlearn that “wisdom”—about genius, about creativity, about writer’s block, topic sentences, and outline—and understand that writing is just as much about thinking, noticing, and learning what it means to be involved in the act of writing. There is no gospel, no orthodoxy, no dogma in this book. Instead it is a gathering of starting points in a journey toward lively, lucid, satisfying self-expression.

Foreign Language Study & Reference

Vintage

The hugely admired author of "The Last Fine Time" preserves and makes new the sights, smells, sounds, and poetry of country living. Klinkenborg reveals the beauty of the American landscape, not from a scenic overlook, but through a screened-in porch or from the window of a pickup driving down an empty highway in the teeth of an approaching storm.

The Rural Life

Back Bay Books

The author of Making Hay and The Last First Time celebrates the rural life, its pleasures and hardships, and the beauty of the American landscape in a series of reflections corresponding to the months of the year. 30,000 first printing.

Science & Math

Nature & Ecology

Little. Brown and Company

A pivotal moment in history comes to life in this portrait, starting in 1947, of the Wenzeks, bar owners for 50 years, of Buffalo, a city aspiring to greatness, and of urban America when it began to alter beyond recognition

Literature & Fiction

History & Criticism

Describes farmers in Minnesota, Iowa, and Montana as they cut and bale hay for their cattle ranches

Making Hay

Technology

A story about Eddie Wenzek, about the life of his family-owned bar, about Buffalo, New York and its immigrants. The book works both as a memoir and an insight into social history and the immigrant experience. By the author of "Making Hay".

Random House Value Publishing

Few writers have attempted to explore the natural history of a particular animal by adopting the animal’s own sensibility. But Verlyn Klinkenborg—with his deeply empathetic relation to the world around him—has done just that, and done it brilliantly, in Timothy. This is the story of a tortoise whose real life was observed by the eighteenth-century English curate Gilbert White, author of The Natural History of Selborne. For thirteen years, Timothy lived in White’s garden—making an occasional appearance in his journals. Now Klinkenborg gives the tortoise an unforgettable voice and powers of observation as keen as those of any bipedal naturalist. The happy result: Timothy regales us with an account of a gracefully paced (no unseemly hurry!) eight-day adventure outside the gate (“How do I escape from that nimble-tongued, fleet-footed race? . . . Walk through the holes in their attention”) and entertains us with shrewd observations about the curious habits and habitations of humanity. “To humans,” Timothy says with doleful understanding, “in and out are matters of life and death. Not to me. Warm earth waits just beneath me. . . . The humans’ own heat keeps them from sensing it.” Wry and wise, unexpectedly moving, and enchanting at every—careful—turn, Timothy will surprise and delight readers of all ages.

Timothy; or, Notes of an Abject Reptile

Humor & Satire

Last Fine Time

History

Americas

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Klinkenborg, Verlyn. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Klinkenborg, Verlyn

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Klinkenborg, Verlyn. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

The Last Fine Time

Several Short Sentences About Writing

Several Short Sentences About Writing

The Rural Life

The Rural Life

The Last Fine Time

Making Hay

The Last Fine Time

Timothy; or, Notes of an Abject Reptile

Last Fine Time