Download or read book The Days of Anna Madrigal written by Armistead Maupin and published by Random House. This book was released on 2014-01-30 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The ninth novel in the beloved Tales of the City series, Armistead Maupin’s best-selling San Francisco saga. 'Wonderful. . . . As compulsively readable and endearing as all the previous novels have been’ Booklist (starred review) ____________________ Now ninety-two, Mrs. Madrigal has seemingly found peace with her ‘logical family’ in San Francisco. Some members of that family are bound for the otherworldly landscape of Burning Man, the art community in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert but Anna has another destination in mind: a lonely stretch of road outside of Winnemucca where the 16-year-old boy she once was ran away from the whorehouse he called home. There she journeys into the dusty troubled heart of her Depression childhood to unearth a lifetime of secrets and dreams and attend to some unfinished business she has long avoided. Hurdling barriers both social and sexual, Maupin leads the eccentric tenants of Barbary Lane through heartbreak and triumph, through nail-biting terrors and gleeful coincidences in a sexually-liberated San Francisco. The result is a glittering and addictive comedy of manners that continues to beguile new generations of readers.

Download or read book Brickmakers written by Selva Almada and published by Charco Press. This book was released on 2021-11-02 with total page 118 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Two young men, Pájaro Tamai and Marciano Miranda, are dying in a deserted amusement park. The story begins almost at its end, just after the two main characters have faced off in a knife fight: the culmination of a rivalry that has pitted them against one another since childhood. The present in Brickmakers is a state of impending death, at moments marked by dream-like visions: Marciano is visited by the ghost of his father, who was murdered when he was a teenager, a father he had sworn to avenge, in a promise he could not keep. Pájaro is also visited, in a recurring nightmare, by his abusive father who disappeared years earlier. Narrated with fury and passion, reminiscent of William Faulkner or Katherine Anne Porter, Brickmakers is a rural tragedy in the great American tradition, a story of love, honour and violence where everything is at stake. Reprising the powerful imagery and the filmic landscape of The Wind That Lays Waste, and the threatening atmosphere of Dead Girls, Brickmakers is yet another proof of Almada’s extraordinary talent.

Download or read book Tales Of The City written by Armistead Maupin and published by Ablaze Publishing. This book was released on 2022-06-22 with total page 132 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A CLASSIC OF LGBTQ LITERATURE THAT HAS BECOME A CULT SEN-SATION! THE HEROES OF THIS ENCHANTING GROUP HAVE BEEN ENJOYED BY MILLIONS OF READERS WORLDWIDE! Adapted on TV (BBC), Limited Se-ries (Netflix), Theater...and now in graphic novel form for the first time! San Francisco, 28 Barbary Lane, Anna Madrigal runs a boarding house. She wel-comes people who have nowhere else to go: the misfits. This matriarch is known for her unending kindness and her superb marijuana crop. The novel starts with the arrival of Mary Ann Singleton, a prudish, naïve, young woman who escaped her dull Ohio hometown for San Francisco. She settles in with her other fellow tenants: Michael “Mouse,” a personable young gay man, Brian Hawkins, an incor-rigible Don Juan, and Mona Ramsey, a young hippyish bisexual.

Download or read book Michael Tolliver Lives written by Armistead Maupin and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2009-10-13 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Inspiration for the Netflix Limited Series, Tales of the City The seventh novel in the beloved Tales of the City series, Armistead Maupin’s best-selling San Francisco saga. Nearly two decades after ending his groundbreaking Tales of the City saga of San Francisco life, Armistead Maupin revisits his all-too-human hero Michael Tolliver—the fifty-five-year-old sweet-spirited gardener and survivor of the plague that took so many of his friends and lovers—for a single day at once mundane and extraordinary... and filled with the everyday miracles of living.

Download or read book Mary Ann in Autumn written by Armistead Maupin and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2010-11-02 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Inspiration for the Netflix Limited Series, Tales of the City The eighth novel in the beloved Tales of the City series, Armistead Maupin’s best-selling San Francisco saga. Following the success of his New York Times bestseller Michael Tolliver Lives, Armistead Maupin’s Mary Ann in Autumn is a touching portrait of friendship, family, and fresh starts, as the City by the Bay welcomes back Mary Ann Singleton, the beloved Tales of the City heroine who started it all. A new chapter begins in the lives of both Mary Ann and Michael “Mouse” Tolliver when she returns to San Francisco to rejoin her oldest friend after years in New York City… the reunion that fans of Maupin’s beloved Tales of the City series have been awaiting for years.

Download or read book Significant Others written by Armistead Maupin and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2012-01-31 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Inspiration for the Netflix Limited Series, Tales of the City The fifth novel in the beloved Tales of the City series, Armistead Maupin’s best-selling San Francisco saga. Tranquillity reigns in the ancient redwood forest until a women-only music festival sets up camp downriver from an all-male retreat for the ruling class. Among those entangled in the ensuing mayhem are a lovesick nurseryman, a panic-stricken philanderer, and the world’s most beautiful fat woman. Significant Others is Armistead Maupin’s cunningly observed meditation on marriage, friendship, and sexual nostalgia.

Download or read book More Tales of the City written by Armistead Maupin and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2012-01-31 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Inspiration for the Netflix Limited Series, Tales of the City The second novel in the beloved Tales of the City series, Armistead Maupin’s best-selling San Francisco saga. The tenants of 28 Barbary Lane have fled their cozy nest for adventures far afield. Mary Ann Singleton finds love at sea with a forgetful stranger, Mona Ramsey discovers her doppelgänger in a desert whorehouse, and Michael Tolliver bumps into his favorite gynecologist in a Mexican bar. Meanwhile, their venerable landlady takes the biggest journey of all—without ever leaving home.

Download or read book The Night Listener written by Armistead Maupin and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2009-10-06 with total page 365 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “With rare authority, humor and stunning grace, Armistead Maupin (Tales of the City) explores the risks and consolations of intimacy while illuminating the mysteries of the storytelling impulse. Noone’s will to make the world more gorgeous, dramatic and satisfying than it is betrays much about the measure of the human heart.” —Chicago Tribune "I'm a fabulist by trade," warns Gabriel Noone, a late-night radio storyteller, as he begins to untangle the skeins of his tumultuous life: his crumbling ten-year love affair, his disaffection from his Southern father, his longtime weakness for ignoring reality. Gabriel's most sympathetic listener is Pete Lomax, a thirteen-year-old fan in Wisconsin whose own horrific past has left him wise and generous beyond his years. But when this virtual father-son relationship is rocked by doubt, a desperate search for the truth ensues. Welcome to the complex, vertiginous world of The Night Listener....

Download or read book Babycakes written by Armistead Maupin and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2012-01-31 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Inspiration for the Netflix Limited Series, Tales of the City The fourth novel in the beloved Tales of the City series, Armistead Maupin’s best-selling San Francisco saga. When an ordinary househusband and his ambitious wife decide to start a family, they discover there’s more to making a baby than meets the eye. Help arrives in the form of a grieving gay neighbor, a visiting monarch, and the dashing young lieutenant who defects from her yacht. Bittersweet and profoundly affecting, Babycakes was the first piece of fiction to acknowledge the arrival of AIDS.

Download or read book Further Tales of the City written by Armistead Maupin and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2012-01-31 with total page 390 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Inspiration for the Netflix Limited Series, Tales of the City The third novel in the beloved Tales of the City series, Armistead Maupin’s best-selling San Francisco saga. The calamity-prone residents of 28 Barbary Lane are at it again in this deliciously dark novel of romance and betrayal. While Anna Madrigal imprisons an anchorwoman in her basement, Michael Tolliver looks for love at the National Gay Rodeo, DeDe Halcyon Day and Mary Ann Singleton track a charismatic psychopath across Alaska, and society columnist Prue Giroux loses her heart to a derelict living in a San Francisco park.

Download or read book Love Later On written by Peggy Knickerbocker and published by Gatekeeper Press. This book was released on 2021-06-01 with total page 183 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Peggy Knickerbocker, a native San Franciscan, and daughter of a drama critic and a political activist, had a long and charmed career in the world of food. She taught cooking, ran a catering business in the 1970’s and co-owned, with her childhood friend, Flicka McGurrin, two colorful restaurants, one still thrives on the waterfront with McGurrin as sole owner. In 1989 she left the business to write about food. At first she wrote steadily for magazines such as Saveur, Food and Wine and Gourmet and then went on to write four cookboo ks, the last won a James Beard Award. She’d eaten her way through every continent by the time she was done writing about food. Along the way, Knickerbocker had the greatest friends and a fascinating life, including years in Paris. She’d wrestled most of her demons to the mat, but with men, she’d faltered. After an early divorce and one or two good relationships, she repeatedly under-served herself with her choices. Late in middle age, Peggy realized that she was quite satisfied with her life. That was when the man appeared. She’d never considered a businessman, let alone one originally from the Midwest. Since Knickerbocker had come of age in San Francisco’s Bohemian North Beach during 70’s, she’d gone for unconventional and often unavailable men. Robert Fisher, a widower, a man with innumerable attractions, pursued her hotly. She clung to her independence only to realize she could have it all. She discovered the man with whom she’d spend her life, and, along the way, the subject of this book.

Download or read book Maybe The Moon written by Armistead Maupin and published by Random House. This book was released on 2012-03-13 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Maybe the Moon, Armistead Maupin's first novel since ending his bestselling Tales of the City series, is the audaciously original chronicle of Cadence Roth -- Hollywood actress, singer, iconoclast and former Guinness Book of Records holder as the world's shortest woman. All of 31 inches tall, Cady is a true survivor in a town where -- as she says -- 'you can die of encouragement'. Her early starring role as a lovable elf in an immensely popular American film proved a major disappointment, since moviegoers never saw the face behind the stifling rubber suit she was required to wear. Now, after a decade of hollow promises from the Industry, she is reduced to performing at birthday parties and Bar Mitzvahs as she waits for the miracle that will finally make her a star. In a series of mordantly funny journal entries, Maupin tracks his spunky heroine across the saffron-hazed wasteland of Los Angeles -- from her all-too-infrequent meetings with agents and studio moguls to her regular harrowing encounters with small children, large dogs and human ignorance. Then one day a lanky piano player saunters into Cady's life, unleashing heady new emotions, and she finds herself going for broke, shooting the moon with a scheme so harebrained and daring that it just might succeed. Her accomplice in the venture is her best friend, Jeff, a gay waiter who sees Cady's struggle for visibility as a natural extension of his own war against the Hollywood Closet. As clear-eyed as it is charming, Maybe the Moon is a modern parable about the mythology of the movies and the toll it exacts from it participants on both sides of the screen. It is a work that speaks to the resilience of the human spirit from a perspective rarely found in literature.

Download or read book Logical Family written by Armistead Maupin and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2017-10-03 with total page 299 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A book for any of us, gay or straight, who have had to find our family. Maupin is one of America’s finest storytellers."—Neil Gaiman "I fell in love with Maupin’s effervescent Tales of the City decades ago, and his genius turn at memoir is no less compelling. Logical Family is a must read."—Mary Karr In this long-awaited memoir, the beloved author of the bestselling Tales of the City series chronicles his odyssey from the old South to freewheeling San Francisco, and his evolution from curious youth to ground-breaking writer and gay rights pioneer. Born in the mid-twentieth century and raised in the heart of conservative North Carolina, Armistead Maupin lost his virginity to another man "on the very spot where the first shots of the Civil War were fired." Realizing that the South was too small for him, this son of a traditional lawyer packed his earthly belongings into his Opel GT (including a beloved portrait of a Confederate ancestor), and took to the road in search of adventure. It was a journey that would lead him from a homoerotic Navy initiation ceremony in the jungles of Vietnam to that strangest of strange lands: San Francisco in the early 1970s. Reflecting on the profound impact those closest to him have had on his life, Maupin shares his candid search for his "logical family," the people he could call his own. "Sooner or later, we have to venture beyond our biological family to find our logical one, the one that actually makes sense for us," he writes. "We have to, if we are to live without squandering our lives." From his loving relationship with his palm-reading Grannie who insisted Maupin was the reincarnation of her artistic bachelor cousin, Curtis, to an awkward conversation about girls with President Richard Nixon in the Oval Office, Maupin tells of the extraordinary individuals and situations that shaped him into one of the most influential writers of the last century. Maupin recalls his losses and life-changing experiences with humor and unflinching honesty, and brings to life flesh-and-blood characters as endearing and unforgettable as the vivid, fraught men and women who populate his enchanting novels. What emerges is an illuminating portrait of the man who depicted the liberation and evolution of America’s queer community over the last four decades with honesty and compassion—and inspired millions to claim their own lives. Logical Family includes black-and-white photographs.

Download or read book Back to Barbary Lane written by Armistead Maupin and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2016-12-06 with total page 450 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: By turns hilarious and heartbreaking, Armistead Maupin's bestselling Tales of the City novels—the fourth, fifth and sixth of which are collected in this second omnibus volume—stand as an incomparable blend of great storytelling and incisive social commentary on American culture from the seventies through the first two decades of the new millennium. “Tearing through [the tales] one after the other, as I did, allows instant gratification; it also lets you appreciate how masterfully they're constructed. No matter what Maupin writes next, he can look back on the rare achievement of having built a little world and made it run.”— Walter Kendrick, Village Voice Literary Supplement Armistead Maupin's uproarious and moving Tales of the City novels have earned a unique niche in American literature and are considered indelible documents of cultural change from the seventies through the first two decades of the new millennium. The nine classic comedies, some of which originally appeared as serials in San Francisco newspapers, won Maupin critical acclaim around the world and enthralled legions of devoted fans. Back to Barbary Lane comprises the second omnibus of the series—Babycakes (1984), Significant Others (1987), and Sure of You (1989)—continuing the saga of the tenants, past and present, of Mrs. Madrigal's beloved apartment house on Russian Hill. While the first trilogy celebrated the carefree excesses of the seventies, this volume tracks its hapless, all-too-human cast across the eighties—a decade troubled by plague, deceit, and overweening ambition. Like its companion volumes, 28 Barbary Lane and Goodbye, Barbary Lane, Back to Barbary Lane is distinguished by what The Guardian of London has called "some of the sharpest and most speakable dialogue you are ever likely to read."

Download or read book Goodbye Barbary Lane written by Armistead Maupin and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2016-12-06 with total page 832 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: By turns hilarious and heartbreaking, Armistead Maupin's bestselling Tales of the City novels—the final three of which are collected in this third omnibus volume—stand as an incomparable blend of great storytelling and incisive social commentary on American culture from the seventies through the first two decades of the new millennium. “These final days of his San Francisco friends and lovers, gay and straight, are seriously moving…. Maupin deftly illustrates how far America and the pioneering Anna have come, and nearly forty years into the series, his writing remains wildly addictive but is deeper and richer.”—People The last three novels of Armistead Maupin’s bestselling, critically-acclaimed Tales of the City are now available for the first time as an omnibus edition. The epic series, published between 1978 and 2014, spans the decade before the AIDS crisis through the era of marriage equality following an unforgettable set of characters, whose diverse sexual identities helped set the social stage for the ongoing sexual revolution. Goodbye Barbary Lane—comprised of Michael Tolliver Lives (2007), Mary Ann in Autumn (2010), and The Days of Anna Madrigal (2014)—brings closure to the lives and legacies of the characters through which generations have found connection to America’s larger cultural struggles over the past four decades. Joining two companion omnibus volumes, 28 Barbary Lane and Back to Barbary Lane, Goodbye Barbary Lane presents all of “Mr. Maupin’s adeptness at fluid dialogue, his flair for shaping characters who thread the needle between pop archetypes and singular human beings, and his great gift for intricate if occasionally preposterous plotting”(New York Times).

Download or read book The Lost Art of Reading written by David L. Ulin and published by Sasquatch Books. This book was released on 2010-06-01 with total page 89 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reading is a revolutionary act, an act of engagement in a culture that wants us to disengage. In The Lost Art of Reading, David L. Ulin asks a number of timely questions - why is literature important? What does it offer, especially now? Blending commentary with memoir, Ulin addresses the importance of the simple act of reading in an increasingly digital culture. Reading a book, flipping through hard pages, or shuffling them on screen - it doesn't matter. The key is the act of reading, and it's seriousness and depth. Ulin emphasizes the importance of reflection and pause allowed by stopping to read a book, and the accompanying focus required to let the mind run free in a world that is not one's own. Are we willing to risk our collective interest in contemplation, nuanced thinking, and empathy? Far from preaching to the choir, The Lost Art of Reading is a call to arms, or rather, to pages.

Download or read book 28 Barbary Lane written by Armistead Maupin and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2016-12-06 with total page 477 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Armistead Maupin's uproarious and moving Tales of the City novels—the first three of which are collected in this omnibus volume—have earned a unique niche in American literature and are considered indelible documents of cultural change from the seventies through the first two decades of the new millennium. “These novels are as difficult to put down as a dish of pistachios. The reader starts playing the old childhood game of 'Just one more chapter and I'll turn out the lights,' only to look up and discover it's after midnight.”—Los Angeles Times Book Review Originally serialized in the San Francisco Chronicle, Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City (1978), More Tales of the City (1980), and Further Tales of the City (1982) afforded a mainstream audience of millions its first exposure to straight and gay characters experiencing on equal terms the follies of urban life. Among the cast of this groundbreaking saga are the lovelorn residents of 28 Barbary Lane: the bewildered but aspiring Mary Ann Singleton, the libidinous Brian Hawkins; Mona Ramsey, still in a sixties trance, Michael "Mouse" Tolliver, forever in bright-eyed pursuit of Mr. Right; and their marijuana-growing landlady, the indefatigable Mrs. Madrigal. Hurdling barriers both social and sexual, Maupin leads them through heartbreak and triumph, through nail-biting terrors and gleeful coincidences. The result is a glittering and addictive comedy of manners that continues to beguile new generations of readers.