In the tradition of Time and Again, a sweeping love story/time-travel epic situated between the modern-day New York art world and fifteenth-century Tuscany. Matt O’Brien has a quiet life: A painting restorer with a particular love of the Quattrocento period of the Italian Renaissance, he toils away millimeter by millimeter, bringing old oils to new light. But one day he happens upon a painting in the basement of the Metropolitan Museum that is thick with centuries of yellowed varnish and dust. As he uncovers the portrait of a mysterious, beautiful woman, he finds himself suffering from an urgent sense of déja vu coupled with the pain of falling in love with a person long dead. Meanwhile, strange things have been happening in the museum since the installation of a wood-paneled room from Gubbio called a studiolo. As Matt increasingly seeks refuge in this magical room from the pressures of having potentially discovered a Leonardo da Vinci, the centuries slip away and he finds himself in the center of a love triangle, with Anna on one side and the Machiavellian knight Leandro, fighting for her fortune, on the other. Obsession and passion combust in this exotic tale that is at once contemporary and rich in period detail. Rooted in art history, music theory, and the rudiments of physics, McKean's debut novel is a mesmerizing tale of time travel and possibility. With twists and turns that are as thrilling as they are unexpected, Quattrocento is escapist storytelling at its very finest.

Quattrocento

Literature & Fiction

McKean, James

United States

DOUBLEDAY

Matt O’Brien, an assistant curator and art restorer at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, has always been passionate about the Italian Renaissance. But when he discovers a long-neglected portrait of a beautiful woman among the museum’s miles of storage bins, he becomes obsessed--and not only because he suspects that the painting is by Leonardo da Vinci. Something about the mysterious woman’s exquisite face stirs his memory, and when Matt finds himself spun across the centuries into Quattrocento Italy, where he arrives perfectly attired in 15th century clothing, he appears to be free to pursue her. A magically woven, richly detailed debut, Quattrocentotells an unforgettable tale of art, and love, and the unexpected places places where they meet.

Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group

If he had not fouled out, maybe Washington State University’s center, James McKean, might have held Lew Alcindor (now Kareem Abdul-Jabbar) to only forty points. It was 1967, a transition year for college athletics in a dramatic time for those coming ofage. In this memoir set in the 1950s and 1960s, McKean revisits his years growing up in a family dedicated to sports and the outdoors, his playing basketball at Washington State University (for coaches Marv Harshman and Jud Heathcote), and his fashioning a life during and after basketball. Driven by the energy and spirit of athletics, the language in Home Stand lights up McKean’s wonderfully eclectic work—the aunt who won a bronze medal in the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, his last run as a misguided drag racer, his playing basketball for a washing machine factory in Bologna, Italy, or against the prisoners in Walla Walla State Penitentiary—all seen in the context of turbulent times. Needless to say, Lew Alcindor scored his points and UCLA won, which they did every game that season. What James McKean took home was five fouls and a good story. Home Stand delivers a lyrical, thoughtful reflection of what it is to be an athlete—inside as well as outside the game—and how one man’s love of basketball evolved into a love of poetry, "good turns of speech," writing, and teaching.

Home Stand: Growing Up in Sports

Sports & Outdoors

Biographies

Michigan State University Press

This second book by James McKean displays a large, dignified, and precise talent—McKean is always looking and reaching out to the difficult world, pulling it to him for examination. Although beginning with outward themes of travels and crossings, Tree of Heaven circles in the end to the journeys of the inner life: the struggle to understand, the ability to see, to suffer the trials of illness and death, to survive love and longing, learning when to leave things as they are, when to let go. McKean's accomplished voice is quiet but firm, at times full of wonder, exploring the personal and discovering what salvation there is in rhythm and words.

Tree of Heaven (Iowa Poetry Prize)

Poetry

University Of Iowa Press

As a boy, Jim McKean understood little about the lives of the women in his family. Perhaps they preferred it that way. Later, marriage brought another group of women and then a daughter brought questions. The answers revealed stories of remarkable women who survived their time and place, creating a legacy of grit and independence, vulnerability and pain, as they struggled to create lives through the vagaries of war, broken homes, and discrimination. Revisiting these stories has drawn Jim McKean back into the family of women who raised him, stories that bind his and their worlds together.

Bound

Biographies & Memoirs

Memoirs

Truman State University Press

As a boy, Jim McKean understood little about the lives of the women in his family. Perhaps they preferred it that way. Later, marriage brought another group of women and then a daughter brought questions. The answers revealed stories of remarkable women who survived their time and place, creating a legacy of grit and independence, vulnerability and pain, as they struggled to create lives through the vagaries of war, broken homes, and discrimination. Revisiting these stories has drawn Jim McKean back into the family of women who raised him, stories that bind his and their worlds together.

Essays & Correspondence

Donella Press

Quattrocento.

Literary

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