Verlyn Klinkenborg's The Last Fine Time sensitively chronicles the life of a family-owned restaurant in Buffalo, New York, from its days before WWII as a Polish tavern to 1947, when it became a swank nightspot serving highballs and Frenchfried shrimp to a generation of servicemen. In the inevitable disappearance of George & Eddie's, as narrated by Klinkenborg, we see the passing of both an Old World way of life and the end of the postwar exuberance that was Eddie Wenzek's "last fine time." A loving portrait of an era and place, The Last Fine Time is, by turns, an elegy, a celebration, a social history, and a tour de force of lyrical style.

Verlyn Klinkenborg comes from a family of Iowa farmers. A member of the editorial board of the New York Times. Klinkenborg has been published in the New Yorker, Harper's, Esquire, National Geographic, Smithsonian, and the New York Times Magazine. He is the author of Making Hay and a collection of essays, The Rural Life.