City Boy Audiobook By Edmund White cover art

City Boy

My Life in New York During the 1960s and '70s

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City Boy

By: Edmund White
Narrated by: Robert Blumenfeld
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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.

©2009 Edmund White (P)2014 Audible Inc. Art & Literature Authors New York Celebrity

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I love Edmund White's novels, but it was hard to struggle through this one. Large portions of the books are about subjects which are only intriguing for scholars of literature or philisophy.

Lecture on '70s literature?

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It is important to know the people who came before us that gave us the freedom we now take for granted.

Every Gay Must Read

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White’s mature work, painted with a sure hand using a lush palette of candor, delicate satire, and an erudition that never strays into pretentiousness, is, in this slim volume, merely hinted at. In “City Boy,” he smudges the canvas of his narration with an aloof monochrome that leaves you wondering why the book was put out for purchase when even the gay-friendly editors at small impresses should have sent it back as “promising but needing work.”

Early White. Not quite there

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A must read for all young gay men !! This is what it toke to get to where we are today in the world of gay

Must read

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Would you listen to City Boy again? Why?

It has its great moments and interesting tidbits of information about NYC and it's gay and non-gay history. I enjoyed hearing this audiobook.

Interesting Reflections and Memoirs

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Terrible. Pointless self indulgent and uninteresting. Sorry I started it and not worth the price

Pointless self indulgent and uninteresting

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I love Edmund white but this was a recycling or amalgam of several excerpts from his novels. And the narrator: awful, uppity, and ultimately a bore.

Pretense upon pretense.

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