City Boy

Product Description

In the New York of the 1970s in the wake of Stonewall & in the midst of economic collapse you might find the likes of Jasper Johns & William Burroughs at the next cocktail party & you were as likely to be caught arguing Marx at the New York City Ballet as cruising for sex in the warehouses & parked trucks along the Hudson. This is the New York that Edmund White portrays in City Boy": a place of enormous intrigue & artistic tumult. Combining the no-holds-barred confession & yearning of "A Boys Own Story" with the easy erudition & sense of place of " The Flaneur" this is the story of Whites years in 1970s New York bouncing from intellectual encounters with Susan Sontag & Harold Brodkey to erotic entanglements downtown to the burgeoning gay scene of artists & writers. Its a moving candid brilliant portrait of a time & place full of encounters with famous names & cultural icons. Critical Praise: " City Boy" seems effortless in its tone; it is seamless wise funny & 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 & with brilliantly-chosen detail & sense of the moment
- Colm Toibin."