Randy Kennedy
Randy Kennedy

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Presidio

Set in the 1970s in the vast and arid landscape of the Texas panhandle, this darkly comic and stunningly mature literary debut tells the story of a car thief and his brother who set out to recover some stolen money and inadvertently kidnap a Mennonite girl who has her own reasons for being on the run.

 

Troy Falconer returns home after years of working as a solitary car thief to help his younger brother, Harlan, search for his wife, who has run away with the little money he had. When they steal a station wagon for the journey, the brothers accidentally kidnap Martha Zacharias, a Mennonite girl asleep in the back of the car. Martha turns out to be a stubborn survivor who refuses to be sent home, so together these unlikely road companions attempt to escape across the Mexican border, pursued by the police and Martha’s vengeful father.

 

The story is told partly through Troy’s journal, in which he chronicles his encounters with con artists, down-and-outers, and roadside philosophers, people looking for fast money, human connection, or a home long since vanished. The journal details a breakdown that has left Troy unable to function in conventional society; he is reduced to haunting motels, stealing from men roughly his size, living with their possessions in order to have none of his own and all but disappearing into their identities.

 

With a page-turning plot about a kidnapped child, gorgeously written scenes that probe the soul of the American West, and an austere landscape as real as any character, Presidio packs a powerful punch of anomie, dark humor, pathos, and suspense.

"Here is a rich and rare book. Reader, if you like poor Texas boys gone bad (or not bad enough), landscapes so accurate in detail you feel you grew up there, coldly logical Mennonite girls with outcast Manitoban-Mexican papas, magnetic details about old cars, the finer points of an automobile-thieving, and a magisterial use of italics you will want to read this novel through twice in a row as I did. It is a hard picture of the choices offered to poor Texas youths in the 1960s and ’70s. You might say it shakes out as a weird combination of Canterbury Tales, Breaking Bad and À la recherche du temps perdu with a dash of Confederacy of Dunces, but it is brilliantly original. You will laugh, you will cry and you will read it again straight through to enjoy the fine points of marvelous writing. There is nothing out there like Presidio."  —Annie Proulx

"Presidio is set in what I think of as Max Crawford Country—the bleak dreamscape around the edges of the Caprock, where life is, to say the least—gritty. Randy Kennedy captures the funny yet tragic relentlessness of survival in an unforgiving place. Let's hope he keeps his novelistic cool and brings us much, much more." —Larry McMurtry

“A fluent, mordant, authentic, propulsive narrative, wonderfully lit from within by an intriguing main character ... This is his first novel and it left me hoping he writes many more.” —Lee Child

"Presidio is a great American novel by a great writer, and one of the best books I’ve had the pleasure of disappearing into in some years."   —Jim Jarmusch

"Randy Kennedy writes wonderful prose. He combines the detail and eye of a journalist with the lyricism of a poet. If you want to read about the real deal down in Texas, he's your man."  —James Lee Burke

“A fabulous novel, executed in rare and exquisite language, about two brothers and the tough little girl, (one of the most engaging fictional heroines in recent memory), they accidentally encounter on a hapless journey across Texas to recover some stolen money. Kennedy is truly the literary heir to Cormac McCarthy in his depiction of the vivid characters and sparsely beautiful landscape of the American West.”  —Dinitia Smith, author of The Honeymoon

"An absolute marvel of a novel. Like a nesting doll, it continually uncovers stories within stories, each revealing the depth and humanity of its fascinating cast of characters. Kennedy has given us a wonderfully compelling portrait of the American West in the second half of the twentieth century, full of danger, humor, and surprises."   —Ian Stansel, author of The Last Cowboys of San Geronimo

24-HR Locksmith

A book of New York street photography

Published by Hassla Books and
The New York Ghost
Edition of 250

Excerpt of a conversation included in the book between Randy Kennedy and Bob Nickas:

 BN:  You’ve been photographing artist’s home and studio buzzers for years. How did this project begin? And one, I would suggest, only possible in New York.

RK:  In the winter of 2017, I took the subway to SoHo to see Vija Celmins, one of my favorite artists. Celmins rarely gives interviews, so I was excited and a little nervous. As I stood in front of her building waiting to be buzzed up, I noticed the name "V. Celmins” written behind the plastic protector on her building's door buzzer, and it appeared to be in Celmins’s own hand. I pulled out my phone and took a picture. There's always been something weirdly appealing to me about the old-fashioned New York building buzzer—names inscribed on the surface of the city in such an inconspicuous and functional way, like a little open secret. Once I had a phone with a camera  ever within reach, I started wanting to take pictures of artists' names when I came across them.

A few months later, waiting to be buzzed up to Roni Horn's studio, I took a shot of her name next to the buzzer. Then I got Ida Applebroog's. Then Dan Graham and John Wesley and Stanley Whitney and Vito Acconci. Pretty soon I'd become a full-on door-buzzer prowler.

BN:  That makes it sound unseemly, sneaky, and wrong. But the buzzers are right there, in public space, on the street. I have the feeling you must’ve gotten hooked pretty quickly.

RK:  It became a thing. I started venturing out specifically in search of good buzzers, guided by Google or artworld friends or artists themselves. It all felt a little silly but also like a good way, as Acconci once said of Following Piece, "to get myself off the writer's desk and into the city." It became a picture diary of artists I'd met or just admired. Also a funny flâneur's Baedeker, like a building inspector’s index of artist dispersion throughout New York in the early years of the 21st century.

BN:  It’s a good thing you started when you did, because nowadays we don’t always see a name on a buzzer. There’s often a system for scrolling down and dialing up, which I can barely figure out. It’s abstract, less human.

RK:  As time went on, I began to notice that. Analog door buzzers were slowly going the way of the payphone or yellow taxi, replaced by more efficient systems—the digital buzzer, the video buzzer, the dial-up buzzer, none of which have use for a physical name inscribed anywhere. I'm told that for years after his death, Duchamp's name at his former studio on 14th Street was still visible on the buzzer, a whispering farewell from the sly respirateur.

BN:  You have the beginning of an archive that also signals the end of an era.

RK:  As the analog recedes, the pictures gathered in a file on my phone seem more and more historical—a street-photographer's time capsule—which is why the idea of gathering them into a little book came about.

 

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Subwayland

Since the doors of the first subway train opened in 1904, New Yorkers and tourists alike have been fascinated, amused, amazed, repelled and bewildered by the world-within-a-world that lies beneath the city. In Subwayland, the creator of The New York Times's award-winning "Tunnel Vision" column leads readers on an intrepid and unconventional tour of this storied subterranean land.

“On every page of this handsomely-written collection, Randy Kennedy has taught me something new. Everything I cherish about the subways is here: the underground community of solitude, the performers, the lunatics, the sinister desperadoes, the professionals who move us through those tunnels in speed and safety, along with the abiding mysteries. If these pieces don't get the remaining subwayphobes out of their stalled autos and into the city's greatest daily marvel, nothing will."  —Pete Hamill

 

"...to read his notes from the underground (and the elevated) is to know that Kennedy crafts city stories on a par with the marvelous Joseph Mitchell's....he discovers Gotham at its scrappiest--the most American place in America."  —Entertainment Weekly