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Author: James McCourt Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company ISBN: 0871404583 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 336
Book Description
A Kirkus Reviews Best Book of 2013 A profoundly American work with distinct echoes of Samuel Beckett, Lasting City hypnotizes with its symphonic lyricism. Enjoined by his dying mother to "tell everything," James McCourt was liberated by this deathbed wish to do just that. The result is Lasting City, a gripping, uniquely McCourt invention: an operatic recollection that braids a nostalgic portrait of old-Irish New York with a boy’s funny, gutter-snipe precocity and hardly innocent coming-of-age in the 1940s and '50s. A literary outlaw in the poetic tradition of Verlaine and Baudelaire, McCourt tells his own story, his mother's, his family's, and that of a lost New York, the lasting city. While ostensibly an account of the author's first seven years, Lasting City expands into a philosophical exploration of memory, perhaps as daring a statement on perception as anything since Faulkner—a kaleidoscopic unraveling of time. Mating fact with fantasy, or fantasy with fact, McCourt takes us from his deeply moving bedside account of his mother Catherine’s death to its traumatic aftermaths both real and imagined, which are—as McCourt tells it—equally real. He revisits the fantasy city of his youth, sometimes in soliloquy, as well as in the plaintive threnody of an older man who recounts his tales of woe to a Hindu cabdriver named Pramit Banarjee on Broadway, only hours after leaving his mother’s bedside. By celebrating our powerlessness over memory, he explores the darkly intense Irish-American family romance and the love-hate relationship between an unusually bright boy and his eternally wise mother, who harbored an excruciating guilty secret. With Joycean panache, McCourt then takes us to the wake, where his aunts recall their sister as if they are the Fates; he has a late-night dialogue with a former showgirl turned hash-slinging waitress; and he then anticipates his own death with the some of the most lyrical cadences in recent literature, wondering whether his ashes will be scattered on the waters of that little rivulet emerging from Central Park's Ramble, where in his grandfather’s day, real Venetian gondoliers, imported from Venice, plied their trade. Reflecting McCourt's belief that "the perfectly diagrammed sentence has become the secret weapon of nice people," Lasting City, written as much for the ear as the reading eye, unfolds in multiple voices that are at times like theater and at times the reverie of a mind lost in memory. It is a heartfelt aria to a lost time and to an eternal city.
Author: James McCourt Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company ISBN: 0871404583 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 336
Book Description
A Kirkus Reviews Best Book of 2013 A profoundly American work with distinct echoes of Samuel Beckett, Lasting City hypnotizes with its symphonic lyricism. Enjoined by his dying mother to "tell everything," James McCourt was liberated by this deathbed wish to do just that. The result is Lasting City, a gripping, uniquely McCourt invention: an operatic recollection that braids a nostalgic portrait of old-Irish New York with a boy’s funny, gutter-snipe precocity and hardly innocent coming-of-age in the 1940s and '50s. A literary outlaw in the poetic tradition of Verlaine and Baudelaire, McCourt tells his own story, his mother's, his family's, and that of a lost New York, the lasting city. While ostensibly an account of the author's first seven years, Lasting City expands into a philosophical exploration of memory, perhaps as daring a statement on perception as anything since Faulkner—a kaleidoscopic unraveling of time. Mating fact with fantasy, or fantasy with fact, McCourt takes us from his deeply moving bedside account of his mother Catherine’s death to its traumatic aftermaths both real and imagined, which are—as McCourt tells it—equally real. He revisits the fantasy city of his youth, sometimes in soliloquy, as well as in the plaintive threnody of an older man who recounts his tales of woe to a Hindu cabdriver named Pramit Banarjee on Broadway, only hours after leaving his mother’s bedside. By celebrating our powerlessness over memory, he explores the darkly intense Irish-American family romance and the love-hate relationship between an unusually bright boy and his eternally wise mother, who harbored an excruciating guilty secret. With Joycean panache, McCourt then takes us to the wake, where his aunts recall their sister as if they are the Fates; he has a late-night dialogue with a former showgirl turned hash-slinging waitress; and he then anticipates his own death with the some of the most lyrical cadences in recent literature, wondering whether his ashes will be scattered on the waters of that little rivulet emerging from Central Park's Ramble, where in his grandfather’s day, real Venetian gondoliers, imported from Venice, plied their trade. Reflecting McCourt's belief that "the perfectly diagrammed sentence has become the secret weapon of nice people," Lasting City, written as much for the ear as the reading eye, unfolds in multiple voices that are at times like theater and at times the reverie of a mind lost in memory. It is a heartfelt aria to a lost time and to an eternal city.
Author: James McCourt Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company ISBN: 0871407248 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 264
Book Description
A Kirkus Reviews Best Book of the Year (Nonfiction) The darkly intense Irish-American family drama come alive like never before in this "virtuosic meta-memoir" (Publishers Weekly, starred review). “The blood-red of Manhattan, the brilliant green of an Irish-American wake, the blue-rinsed divas of the opera and the bathhouse alike” (Michael Gorra) are hypnotically rendered in this “astoundingly smart book” (John Waters). With some of the most lyrical cadences in recent literature, the legendary James McCourt animates twentieth-century New York through a “kaleidoscope of sharp-edged, brilliantly colored memories” (J. D. McClatchy) and with “dynamic prose and high-brow erudition that has gone the way of the dodo” (Publishers Weekly). Braiding a nostalgic portrait of the eternal city with a boy’s funny, guttersnipe precocity and outrageous coming-of-age in the 1940s and 1950s, McCourt revisits the fantasy city of his youth with Proustian memories of steam calliopes in Central Park, Hiroshima “obliterated in a flash of light,” and closing his mother’s eyes for the last time. As sensational as it is satisfying, Lasting City, a profoundly American work, identifies the spot where genius and madness meet.
Author: Kevin Lynch Publisher: MIT Press ISBN: 9780262620017 Category : Architecture Languages : en Pages : 212
Book Description
The classic work on the evaluation of city form. What does the city's form actually mean to the people who live there? What can the city planner do to make the city's image more vivid and memorable to the city dweller? To answer these questions, Mr. Lynch, supported by studies of Los Angeles, Boston, and Jersey City, formulates a new criterion—imageability—and shows its potential value as a guide for the building and rebuilding of cities. The wide scope of this study leads to an original and vital method for the evaluation of city form. The architect, the planner, and certainly the city dweller will all want to read this book.
Author: Tom Vanderbilt Publisher: University of Chicago Press ISBN: 0226846954 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 235
Book Description
On the road to Survival City, Tom Vanderbilt maps the visible and invisible legacies of the cold war, exhuming the blueprints for the apocalypse we once envisioned and chronicling a time when we all lived at ground zero. In this road trip among ruined missile silos, atomic storage bunkers, and secret test sites, a lost battleground emerges amid the architecture of the 1950s, accompanied by Walter Cotten’s stunning photographs. Survival City looks deep into the national soul, unearthing the dreams and fears that drove us during the latter half of the twentieth century. “A crucial and dazzling book, masterful, and for me at least, intoxicating.”—Dave Eggers “A genuinely engaging book, perhaps because [Vanderbilt] is skillful at conveying his own sense of engagement to the reader.”—Los Angeles Times “A retracing of Dr. Strangelove as ordinary life.”—Greil Marcus, Bookforum
Author: Carley Fortune Publisher: Penguin ISBN: 059343854X Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 295
Book Description
"A radiant debut."—Emily Henry, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Book Lovers THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER! Named One of the Hottest Reads of Summer 2022 by Today ∙ Parade ∙ PopSugar ∙ USA Today ∙ SheReads ∙ BuzzFeed ∙ BookBub ∙ Bustle ∙ and more! Six summers to fall in love. One moment to fall apart. A weekend to get it right. They say you can never go home again, and for Persephone Fraser, ever since she made the biggest mistake of her life a decade ago, that has felt too true. Instead of glittering summers on the lakeshore of her childhood, she spends them in a stylish apartment in the city, going out with friends, and keeping everyone a safe distance from her heart. Until she receives the call that sends her racing back to Barry’s Bay and into the orbit of Sam Florek—the man she never thought she’d have to live without. For six summers, through hazy afternoons on the water and warm summer nights working in his family’s restaurant and curling up together with books—medical textbooks for him and work-in-progress horror short stories for her—Percy and Sam had been inseparable. Eventually that friendship turned into something breathtakingly more, before it fell spectacularly apart. When Percy returns to the lake for Sam’s mother’s funeral, their connection is as undeniable as it had always been. But until Percy can confront the decisions she made and the years she’s spent punishing herself for them, they’ll never know whether their love might be bigger than the biggest mistakes of their past. Told over the course of six years and one weekend, Every Summer After is a big, sweeping nostalgic story of love and the people and choices that mark us forever.
Author: James McCourt Publisher: New York Review of Books ISBN: 1590175409 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 233
Book Description
Diva Mawrdew Czgowchwz (pronounced “Mardu Gorgeous”) bursts like the most brilliant of comets onto the international opera scene, only to confront the deadly malice and black magic of her rivals. Outrageous and uproarious, flamboyant and serious as only the most perfect frivolity can be, James McCourt’s entrancing send-up of the world of opera has been a cult classic for more than a quarter-century. This comic tribute to the love of art is a triumph of art and love by a contemporary American master.
Author: Julia Wertz Publisher: Black Dog & Leventhal ISBN: 0316501220 Category : Comics & Graphic Novels Languages : en Pages : 286
Book Description
A New York Times Notable Book of 2017! Here is New York, as you've never seen it before. A perfectly charming, sidesplittingly funny, intellectually entertaining illustrated history of the blocks, the buildings, and the guts of New York City, based on Julia Wertz's popular illustrated columns in The New Yorker and Harper's. In Tenements, Towers & Trash, Julia Wertz takes us behind the New York that you think you know. Not the tourist's New York-the Statue of Liberty makes a brief appearance and the Empire State Building not at all-but the guts, the underbelly, of this city that never sleeps. With drawings and comics in her signature style, Wertz regales us with streetscapes "Then and Now" and little-known tales, such as the lost history of Kim's Video, the complicated and unresolved business of Ray's Pizza, the vintage trash and horse bones that litter the shore of Brooklyn's Bottle Beach, the ludicrous pinball prohibition, Staten Island's secret abandoned boatyard, and the hair-raising legend of the infamous abortionist of Fifth Avenue, Madame Restell. From bars, bakeries, and bookstores to food carts, street cleaners, and apartments both cramped and grand, Tenements, Towers & Trash is a wild ride in a time machine taxi from the present day city to bygone days of yore.
Author: Neil Smith Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 1134787464 Category : Architecture Languages : en Pages : 348
Book Description
Why have so many central and inner cities in Europe, North America and Australia been so radically revamped in the last three decades, converting urban decay into new chic? Will the process continue in the twenty-first century or has it ended? What does this mean for the people who live there? Can they do anything about it? This book challenges conventional wisdom, which holds gentrification to be the simple outcome of new middle-class tastes and a demand for urban living. It reveals gentrification as part of a much larger shift in the political economy and culture of the late twentieth century. Documenting in gritty detail the conflicts that gentrification brings to the new urban 'frontiers', the author explores the interconnections of urban policy, patterns of investment, eviction, and homelessness. The failure of liberal urban policy and the end of the 1980s financial boom have made the end-of-the-century city a darker and more dangerous place. Public policy and the private market are conspiring against minorities, working people, the poor, and the homeless as never before. In the emerging revanchist city, gentrification has become part of this policy of revenge.
Author: Regina Rudaitytė Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing ISBN: 1527514536 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 303
Book Description
The advent of the new age has alerted us to the conflicted nature of historical memory which defined the 20th century while simultaneously assaulting us with new historical upheavals that demand responsibility and critical consideration. As the historical text bears traces of the writing subject, the element of deception is remarkable, meaning historical memory easily lends itself to forgery and false and subjective projections. As such, how do we think about the past, about history, about memory, and how does memory function? Is history an objective account, a collection of dry, reliable facts? Is it an imaginative narrative, tinged with nostalgia, a projection of our wishful thinking, the workings of our subjective perceptions and attitudes, our states of mind? The essays in this volume focus on the relevance of the past to the present and future in terms of the shifting attitudes to personal and collective experiences that have shaped dominant Western critical discourses about history, memory, and nostalgia. The contributors here take issue with the epistemological, hermeneutic, ethical, and aesthetic dimensions of the representational practices through which we revisit and revise the meaning of the past.