City Boy
My Life in New York During the 1960s and '70s
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City Boy
Buy Now for £14.99
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Narrated by:
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Robert Blumenfeld
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By:
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Edmund White
About this listen
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.
©2009 Edmund White (P)2014 Audible Inc.Interesting
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For those who know EW the book will please them as they catch up with the ‘boy’ from ‘A Boys Own Story’.
For those who don’t, his insights into Gay NY in the 70s and his own personal story as an adult becoming a successful writer, may not be as shocking or revolutionary as his first autobio (times have indeed changed). But his blunt references to sex may still jar. I enjoyed the history as it was to an extent mine own, but for me the book loses its way and becomes more about the writers literary milieu and less about his own gay life story.
There are times when i find him disingenuous despite efforts to be frank (‘we were so poor we couldn’t afford records’ is two sentences away from ‘the private school i sent my nephew to around the corner’ - seemingly at the same moment), and while his observations on the state of NYC do have the power to make us think about the politics of the times and indeed the future, EW offers little comment on what he thinks is good or bad about the shifting sands.
More for fans and his own literary coterie who (if alive) will no doubt be poring over every sentence for validation, approbation etc.
Inward looking life and times of a literary pioneer.
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