City Boy

A New York Times Notable Book of 2009

An NPR Best Book of 2009

"In City Boy, White is amusing and raucous as ever but he also lets the mask slip... Some stories don't need to be embellished to glow." - New York Times Book Review, Editor's Choice

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‘An open-throttled tour of New York City during the bad old days of the 1960s and early '70s ... it's all here in exacting and eye-popping detail’ - New York Times

‘Energetic evocation of Manhattan in the Sixties and Seventies ... an absorbing insight into the life alongside a constellation of greats of the American literary and gay scenes’ - Harper's Bazaar

‘At once fascinating social history and sublimely detailed gossip’ - John Irving
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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.