City Boy: My Life in New York During the 1960s and '70s
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | 4.53 (652 Votes) |
| Asin | : | 1608192342 |
| Format Type | : | paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 304 Pages |
| Publish Date | : | 2015-09-15 |
| Language | : | English |
DESCRIPTION:
An esteemed novelist and cultural critic, Edmund White is the author of many books, including the autobiographical novel A Boy's Own Story; a previous memoir, My Lives; and most recently a biography of poet Arthur Rimbaud. White lives in New York City and teaches writing at Princeton University.
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. Nabokov later labeled it a marvelous book, ranking White along with Updike and Robbe-Grillet. From Publishers Weekly Starred Review. How he overcame setbacks and confronted his insecurities to eventually write 23 books makes for fascinating reading. (Oct.)Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. In 1970, he quit his job to live in Rome, returning to find sexual abundance in New York. 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. He arrived from the Midwest in 1962, worked at Time-Life Books, haunted th
"New York Days -- And Nights" according to Foster Corbin. In Edmund White's latest book he fleshes out-- no pun intended-- material he has covered previously in MY LIVES, the time he spent in New York in the 1960's and 70's. It was the time that Brad Gooch has labeled "the golden age of promiscuity" in his novel by the same name and that Susan Sontag-- one of the people White writes extensively about-- describes as the only time in human history when people "were free to have sex when and how they wanted," because of access to birth control pills and before the adve. Dear Ed, I read City Boy in two sittings. And loved it. I came to New York several years before you, turned to gay life without a qualm, and took root in Manhattan forever. Now I'm retired and don't have a friend and Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn. I never had your sexual compulsiveness, and sought to develop a real sustained relationship, true love like in the thousands of movies I've seen. I was always faithful, my significant other significantly NOT. The three I took up with are dead now of AIDS.Your book wa. "Where's The Beef?" according to Blake Fraina. In Alan Bennett's play The History Boys, when the dimmest of the students is asked to define history, he replies, "It's just one [expletive] thing after another." Reductive? Perhaps. Funny? Certainly. But also, quite true.And it happens to be the reason I tend to avoid non-fictionmemoirs in particular. At least when one is writing a biography (particularly about someone who is already dead) or writing about history, the author has enough distance to give the story some shape and ascribe it some sort of meanin
White struggles to gain literary recognition, witnesses the rise of the gay rights movement, and has memorable encounters with luminaries from Elizabeth Bishop to William Burroughs, Susan Sontag to Jasper Johns. Groundbreaking literary icon Edmund White reflects on his remarkable life in New York in an era when the city was economically devastated but incandescent with art and ideas. Recording his ambitions and desires, recalling lovers and literary heroes, White displays the wit, candor, and generosity that have defined his unique voice over the decades.