John Kenney – författare

INSTANT NATIONAL BESTSELLER · One of NPR’s Book We Love 2025 · A Gotham Book Prize Finalist · An Indie Next & LibraryReads Pick · AudioFiles Earphones Award Winner · Library Journal | Audio "Editor's Picks of the Year” · 2026 Lariat Adult Fiction Reading List Pick"Razor-sharp, darkly comedic, and emotionally piercing. With the satirical bite of Richard Russo’s Straight Man, the introspection of Fredrik Backman’s A Man Called Ove, and the reinvention of Andrew Sean Greer's Less, Kenney’s vivid prose transforms the mundane into unexpected hilarity."—Booklist (starred review)Obituary writer Bud Stanley isn’t really living his best life. He’s fallen into a funk after a divorce. (She left him for another man, who, in fairness, was far more interesting.) He’s not doing his job well. He’s given up on dating. And he’s about to be fired for accidentally publishing his own obituary one mildly drunken night (though technically the company can’t legally fire a dead person).As Bud awaits his fate at work, he does the only logical thing: He goes to the wakes and funerals of total strangers to learn how to live again.

Finbar Dolan is lost and lonely. Except he doesn't know it. Despite escaping his blue-collar Boston upbringing to carve out a mildly successful career at a Madison Avenue ad agency, he's a bit of a mess and closing in on forty. He's recently called off his wedding. Now, a few days before Christmas, he's forced to cancel a long-postponed vacation in order to write, produce, and edit a Superbowl commercial for his diaper account in record time.Fortunately, it gets worse. He learns that his long-estranged and once-abusive father has fallen ill. And that neither his brothers nor his sister intend to visit. It's a wake-up call for Fin to re-evaluate the choices he's made, admit that he's falling for his co-worker Phoebe, question the importance of diapers in his life, and finally tell the truth about his life and his past.

Including such gems as Why Are You in The Shower With Me? Our Love is Tested in Traffic and What Time Should We Leave for the Airport? John Kenney's poems are packed with funny, wry observations about the reality of life once the initial shine of a relationship has dulled. From parental gripes to dwindling sex lives; from less-than-romantic gifts to irritating personal habits, it's all covered.____________________Are you in the mood?I am.Let's put the kids down.Have a light dinner.Shower.Maybe not drink so much.And do that thing I would rather do with you than with anyone else.Lie in bed and look at our iPhones.