Book description
In the New Y ork 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. I t's a moving, candid, brilliant portrait of a time and place,
full of encounters with famous names and cultural icons.
CRITICAL PRAISE: "City Boy seems effortless in its
tone; it is seamless, wise, funny and charming. The New York described
in the book is history now, but history that has made an essential
difference to the way we live now. Edmund White evokes the main
players in the culture of the city, all of whom he knew, with clarity
and with brilliantly-chosen detail and sense of the moment."-Colm Toibin
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.
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.
