![]() ![]() We are taken on a guided tour of gay bars and beaches, turkish baths, parks, S & M scenes (Sado-Masochism) for those of you who aren’t aficionados), queer parties and movie houses, faggot social life and street life, and so on. The episodes that comprise Book One are concerned with those lives lived out darkly in what is nowadays called The Homosexual Underground, though never before has it been so much on the surface. One night sex and cigarette smoke and rooms squashed in by loneliness…Īnd I would remember lives lived out darkly in that vast City of Night, from all-night movies to Beverly Hills mansions.Īctually, City of Night is two books of short stories, sneaking their way through each other to give the volume the appearance of a novel, partly, I would guess, because novels are more negotiable than short stories and partly, I am sure, because the amorality of the characters in what I will call Book One helps disguise the eminently respectable morality of the hero-narrator in Book Two. Later I would think of America as one vast City of Night stretching gaudily from Times Square to Hollywood Boulevard-jukebox-winking, rock-n-roll moaning: America at night fusing its dark cities into the unmistakable shape of loneliness. Here are three quotes that come to you through the courtesy of Page One alone: So fabricated is it that, despite the adorable photograph on the rear of the dust jacket, I can hardly believe there is a real John Rechy-and if there is, he would probably be the first to agree that there isn’t-for City of Night reads like the unTrue Confessions of a Male Whore as told to Jean Genet, Djuna Barnes, Truman Capote, Gore Vidal, Thomas Wolfe, Fanny Hurst and Dr. "About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.This is the worst confection yet devised by the masterminds behind the Grove epater-la-post-office Machine. He has received many awards, including PEN Center USA’s Lifetime Achievement Award and the William Whitehead Award for Lifetime Achievement. John Rechy is the author of twelve novels, among them the New York Times bestseller Numbers, the Los Angeles Times bestsellers Rushes and The Coming of the Night, as well as The Miraculous Day of Amalia Gómez and the nonfiction books The Sexual Outlaw and About My Life and the Kept Woman (all from Grove Press). An NEA recipient, he is also the author of several plays, essays, and short stories. His most recent novel, The Coming of the Night, was published by Grove Press in 1999. He is the author of eleven other novels, among them Numbers, Rushes, The Sexual Outlaw (all from Grove Press), The Miraculous Day of Amalia Gomez, and Our Lady of Babylon. John Rechy is the recipient of the PEN-USA West's Lifetime Achievement Award (he was the first novelist to be awarded the prize) and the Publishing Triangle's William Whitehead Lifetime Achievement Award. " illuminates, it stirs the heart, it is unforgettable."-Herbert Gold "Probably no first novel is so complete, so well held together, and so important as City of Night."-The Houston Post This is a most humbling and liberating achievement."-James Baldwin tells the truth, and tells it with such passion that we are forced to share in the life he conveys. "Rechy's tone rings absolutely true, is absolutely his own, and he has the kind of discipline which allows him a rare and beautiful recklessness. The book therefore has the unmistakable ring of candor and truth."-The New York Times Book Review Rechy writes in an authentic jive-like slang: the nightmare existence is explored with a clarity not often clouded by sentimentality and self-pity. "One of the major books to be published since World War II."-The Washington Post As the narrator moves from El Paso to Times Square, from Pershing Square to the French Quarter, we get an unforgettable look at life on the edge Bold and inventive in his account of the urban underworld of male prostitution, Rechy is equally unflinching in his portrayal of one hustling "youngman" and his search for self-knowledge within the neon-lit world of hustlers, drag queens, and men on every kind of make. When John Rechy's explosive first novel-now a classic-appeared in 1963, it became a national best-seller and ushered in a new era of gay fiction.
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