9780385333344
Charming Billy
McDermott, Alice
ISBN 13: 9780385333344
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Publication Date: 1999
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This guide is intended to enrich your experience of reading Alice McDermott'sCharming Billy. This powerful novel by the acclaimed author ofAt Weddings and Wakespresents a moving and wryly ironic portrait of Billy Lynch, a charming but enigmatic man, and his extended Irish-American family during the years between World War II and the 1990s. The family and friends assembled at Billy's funeral remember him with fond exasperation. A self-destructive alcoholic who drank himself into a premature grave, Billy caused much grief to his friends and his gentle, devoted wife, Maeve; yet everyone loved him for his charming and affectionate nature. His friends are aware that as a young ex-GI Billy had fallen in love with and become engaged to Eva, a lovely Irish girl who returned to Ireland and died before she could come back to America to join him; therefore they see his drinking as a perverse way of being faithful to her memory. But as the narrator begins to piece together a clearer picture of the past through conversations with her father, Billy's cousin and closest friend, she comes to recognize that the story of Billyand, by extension, of her fatheris far more complex and nuanced than she had ever imagined.Charming Billy, like McDermott's other novels, brilliantly exposes the rich psychological drama within even the most seemingly ordinary lives and is full of all the intelligent sensitivity, emotion, and vivid feeling for atmosphere that readers have come to expect from this captivating author.
Charming Billy: Search Results
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Charming Billy (ISBN: 038533334X / 0-385-33334-X) McDermott, Alice Quantity Available: 3
Book Description: Dell Publishing, 1999. Paperback. Book Condition: New. The pages of this books are clean and unmarked. There is very little shelf wear. Bookseller Inventory # 094174 Bookseller & Payment Information | More Books from this Seller | Ask Bookseller a Question |
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Charming Billy (ISBN: 038533334X / 0-385-33334-X) McDermott, Alice Quantity Available: 1
Book Description: Dell Publishing. PAPERBACK. Book Condition: New. 038533334X New Item. 100% Customer Satisfaction Guaranteed. Bookseller Inventory # Z038533334XZN Bookseller & Payment Information | More Books from this Seller | Ask Bookseller a Question |
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Charming Billy (ISBN: 038533334X / 0-385-33334-X) McDermott, Alice Quantity Available: 1
Book Description: Dell Publishing, 1999. Paperback. Book Condition: New. Paperback. Unconditional money back guarantee. Bookseller Inventory # 42091 Bookseller & Payment Information | More Books from this Seller | Ask Bookseller a Question |
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Charming Billy (ISBN: 038533334X / 0-385-33334-X) McDermott, Alice Quantity Available: 1
Book Description: 1999. Soft Cover. Book Condition: New. Bookseller Inventory # 004331 Bookseller & Payment Information | More Books from this Seller | Ask Bookseller a Question |
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Charming Billy (ISBN: 038533334X / 0-385-33334-X) McDermott, Alice Quantity Available: 1
Book Description: Dell Publishing. PAPERBACK. Book Condition: New. 038533334X New - Never read, May contain Publishers remainder marks, Fast Shipping!. Bookseller Inventory # CS110471 Bookseller & Payment Information | More Books from this Seller | Ask Bookseller a Question |
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Charming Billy (ISBN: 038533334X / 0-385-33334-X) McDermott, Alice Quantity Available: 1
Book Description: Dell Publishing, New York, New York, U.S.A., 1999. Trade Paperback. Book Condition: New. No Jacket. 038533334X As New. Bookseller Inventory # HD360 Bookseller & Payment Information | More Books from this Seller | Ask Bookseller a Question |
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Charming Billy (ISBN: 038533334X / 0-385-33334-X) McDermott, Alice Quantity Available: 1
Book Description: Dell Publishing, New York, NY, U.S.A., 1999. Soft Cover. Book Condition: New. 8vo - over 7¾" - 9¾" tall. Seller is highly recommended with excellent customer service record. Bookseller Inventory # 004506 Bookseller & Payment Information | More Books from this Seller | Ask Bookseller a Question |
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| 8. |
Charming Billy (ISBN: 038533334X / 0-385-33334-X) McDermott, Alice Quantity Available: 1
Book Description: Dial Press Trade Paperback January 1999, 1999. Paper Back. Book Condition: New. National Book Award winner Alice McDermott considered majoring in sociology because it seemed 'collegey,' but her freshman writing professor counseled otherwise: 'I've got bad news for you. You're a writer.' An Irish Catholic from the suburbs of Long Island, McDermott has plenty to write about. Her prose is exacting but lyric, its rhythm built on word and phrase repetitions that would be tedious in a less consummate writer. Called 'prismatic' and 'elliptical' by reviewers, her novels circle around their subjects, building on the shifting inner lives of the characters and creating drama from the tension of what isn't told. Through a minute attention to detail and routine, Alice McDermott tells stories of faith without grand gestures or elaborate conceits. The force of her work comes by the accumulation of beautiful sentences, constructed to reveal the sense and order she makes of living, loving, and leaving this world. Set in Long Island and the Bronx within a tightly knit Irish American community, Charming Billy (winner of the National Book Award) tells the story of Billy Lynch, a charismatic dreamer who stakes his life on a lovely Irish girl he meets shortly after the war. Beginning with Billy's funeral, McDermott pieces together his life by the stories his friends and family tell. Instead of Eva, Billy marries Maeve. Instead of a house by the sea and a carload of kids, he roams the bars by night, seeking what redemption he can. 'Heaven was there, utterly necessary, utterly sensible, the only possible reconciliation of the way he must live day by day and the certainty he'd felt that life meant something greater. The only redemption, the only compensation for the disappointment, the cruelty and pain that plagues the living, for love itself, because when he turned his eyes to heaven, heaven was there and Eva was in it.'. Bookseller Inventory # 20090623158134 Bookseller & Payment Information | More Books from this Seller | Ask Bookseller a Question |
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| 9. |
Charming Billy (ISBN: 038533334X / 0-385-33334-X) McDermott, Alice Quantity Available: 1
Book Description: Dial Press Trade Paperback January 1999, 1999. Paper Back. Book Condition: New. National Book Award winner Alice McDermott considered majoring in sociology because it seemed 'collegey,' but her freshman writing professor counseled otherwise: 'I've got bad news for you. You're a writer.' An Irish Catholic from the suburbs of Long Island, McDermott has plenty to write about. Her prose is exacting but lyric, its rhythm built on word and phrase repetitions that would be tedious in a less consummate writer. Called 'prismatic' and 'elliptical' by reviewers, her novels circle around their subjects, building on the shifting inner lives of the characters and creating drama from the tension of what isn't told. Through a minute attention to detail and routine, Alice McDermott tells stories of faith without grand gestures or elaborate conceits. The force of her work comes by the accumulation of beautiful sentences, constructed to reveal the sense and order she makes of living, loving, and leaving this world. Set in Long Island and the Bronx within a tightly knit Irish American community, Charming Billy (winner of the National Book Award) tells the story of Billy Lynch, a charismatic dreamer who stakes his life on a lovely Irish girl he meets shortly after the war. Beginning with Billy's funeral, McDermott pieces together his life by the stories his friends and family tell. Instead of Eva, Billy marries Maeve. Instead of a house by the sea and a carload of kids, he roams the bars by night, seeking what redemption he can. 'Heaven was there, utterly necessary, utterly sensible, the only possible reconciliation of the way he must live day by day and the certainty he'd felt that life meant something greater. The only redemption, the only compensation for the disappointment, the cruelty and pain that plagues the living, for love itself, because when he turned his eyes to heaven, heaven was there and Eva was in it.'. Bookseller Inventory # 20080501140078 Bookseller & Payment Information | More Books from this Seller | Ask Bookseller a Question |
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| 10. |
Charming Billy (ISBN: 038533334X / 0-385-33334-X) McDermott, Alice Quantity Available: 1
Book Description: Dial Press Trade Paperback, 1999. Paperback. Book Condition: New. Bookseller Inventory # 21-4-31 Bookseller & Payment Information | More Books from this Seller | Ask Bookseller a Question |
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