Monday, October 5, the Half King, 505 West 23rd St. at Tenth Ave., 7:00
Tuesday, October 6, Three Lives, 154 West Tenth St. at Waverly Pl., 7:00
Wednesday, October 7, the Tenement Museum, 108 Orchard St., 6:30
Friday, October 9, 192 Books, 192 Tenth Ave. at 21st St., 7:00
http://www.bloomsburyusa.com
http://www.edmundwhite.com
Edmund White is known for his groundbreaking fiction and nonfiction, his early willingness to deal with gay themes and narratives (A BOY’S OWN STORY), his teaching at Princeton, and his position as a preeminent figure on New York’s literary scene. Of course, it wasn’t always this way. CITY BOY (Bloomsbury, September 29, 2009, $26) is an amazing memoir of White’s hunger for literary fame — for publication even — and intellectual esteem in the superheated creative world of ’60s and ’70s New York. His sketches of writers and artists, including everyone from poets James Merrill and John Ashbery to artist Robert Wilson and editor Robert Gottlieb, are full of bon mots, sharply observed details, and great honesty about his own desires for love and esteem. CITY BOY vividly brings to life the sheer squalor of life in 1970s New York — nothing like today’s wealth-sanitized playground — as well as the nascent, sometimes cruel, and unformed texture of gay life, pre-Stonewall and pre-“marriage rights.” A wonderful raconteur with a well-stocked fund of anecdotes and observations, White’s writings reveal much about alliances, alignments, and personalities from a vanished world that still echo strongly in our own.
White will be speaking October 5 at the Half King with GRANTA editor Patrick Ryan and reading from CITY BOY on October 6 at Three Lives, October 7 at the Tenement Museum with Michael Greenberg, and October 9 at 192 Books.
