מאת Edmund White
'An open-throttled tour of New York City during the bad old days of the 1960s and early '70s ... it's all here in exacting and eye-popping detail' - New York Times
'Energetic evocation of Manhattan in the Sixties and Seventies ... an absorbing insight into the life alongside a constellation of greats of the American literary and gay scenes' - Harper's Bazaar
'At once fascinating social history and sublimely detailed gossip' - John Irving
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In the New York of the 1970s, in the wake of Stonewall and in the midst of economic collapse, you might find the likes of Jasper Johns and William Burroughs at the next cocktail party, and you were as likely to be caught arguing Marx at the New York City Ballet as cruising for sex in the warehouses and parked trucks along the Hudson.
This is the New York that Edmund White portrays in City Boy: a place of enormous intrigue and artistic tumult. Combining the no-holds-barred confession and yearning of A Boy's Own Story with the easy erudition and sense of place of The Flaneur, this is the story of White's years in 1970s New York, bouncing from intellectual encounters with Susan Sontag and Harold Brodkey to erotic entanglements downtown to the burgeoning gay scene of artists and writers. It's a moving, candid, brilliant portrait of a time and place, full of encounters with famous names and cultural icons.
'An open-throttled tour of New York City during the bad old days of the 1960s and early '70s ... it's all here in exacting and eye-popping detail' - New York Times
'Energetic evocation of Manhattan in the Sixties and Seventies ... an absorbing insight into the life alongside a constellation of greats of the American literary and gay scenes' - Harper's Bazaar
'At once fascinating social history and sublimely detailed gossip' - John Irving
______________
In the New York of the 1970s, in the wake of Stonewall and in the midst of economic collapse, you might find the likes of Jasper Johns and William Burroughs at the next cocktail party, and you were as likely to be caught arguing Marx at the New York City Ballet as cruising for sex in the warehouses and parked trucks along the Hudson.
This is the New York that Edmund White portrays in City Boy: a place of enormous intrigue and artistic tumult. Combining the no-holds-barred confession and yearning of A Boy's Own Story with the easy erudition and sense of place of The Flaneur, this is the story of White's years in 1970s New York, bouncing from intellectual encounters with Susan Sontag and Harold Brodkey to erotic entanglements downtown to the burgeoning gay scene of artists and writers. It's a moving, candid, brilliant portrait of a time and place, full of encounters with famous names and cultural icons.
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Starred review from August 10, 2009
Novelist and critic White (A Boy's Own Story
; The Joy of Gay Sex
) weaves erotic encounters and long-ago literati into a vast tapestry of Manhattan memories. He arrived from the Midwest in 1962, worked at Time-Life Books, haunted the Gotham Book Mart and went street cruising: “We had to seek out most of our men on the hoof.” In 1970, he quit his job to live in Rome, returning to find “sexual abundance” in New York. An editor with Saturday Review
and Horizon
, White knew artists, writers and poets, yet his own writing remained at the starting gate. He fictionalized Fire Island rituals for his first novel, Forgetting Elena
(1971), which took years to find a publisher and then sold only 600 copies. Nabokov later labeled it “a marvelous book,” ranking White along with Updike and Robbe-Grillet. His second novel, about hetero/homosexual friendships, was never published, yet he “longed for literary celebrity.” How he overcame setbacks and confronted his insecurities to eventually write 23 books makes for fascinating reading. Along the way, he notes how Fun City became Fear City with the AIDS crisis, and he recalls meeting everyone from Borges, Burroughs and Capote to Peggy Guggenheim, John Ashbery, Susan Sontag, Robert Mapplethorpe and Jasper Johns. White writes with a simple, fluid style, and beneath his patina of pain, a refreshing honesty emerges. This is a brilliant recreation of an era, rich in revels, revolutions and “leather boys leading the human tidal wave.” - New York Times 'An open-throttled tour of New York City during the bad old days of the 1960s and early '70s... it's all here in exacting and eye-popping detail'
- Harper's Bazaar 'Energetic evocation of Manhatten in the Sixties and Seventies...an absorbing insight into the life alongside a constellation of greats of the American literary and gay scenes'
- John Irving 'This splendid book is at once fascinating social history and sublimely detailed gossip'
- Alan Hollinghurst 'A wonderful deepening and broadening of Edmund White's great life-work . . . Everything he says about love and friendship is so penetrating and true . . . a marvellous book'
- Kirkus Reviews A graceful memoir of a decidedly ungraceful time in the life of New York City... A welcome portrait of a time and place long past, and much yearned for.
