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 ...
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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."
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Add this copy of Lasting City: the Anatomy of Nostalgia to cart. $2.28, good condition, Sold by ThriftBooks-Atlanta rated 5.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Brownstown, MI, UNITED STATES, published 2013 by Liveright Publishing Corporation.
Add this copy of Lasting City: the Anatomy of Nostalgia to cart. $2.28, good condition, Sold by ThriftBooks-Baltimore rated 4.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Halethorpe, MD, UNITED STATES, published 2013 by Liveright Publishing Corporation.
Add this copy of Lasting City: the Anatomy of Nostalgia to cart. $2.30, good condition, Sold by Blue Vase Books rated 5.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Interlochen, MI, UNITED STATES, published 2013 by Liveright Publishing Corporation.
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Seller's Description:
The item shows wear from consistent use, but it remains in good condition and works perfectly. All pages and cover are intact (including the dust cover, if applicable). Spine may show signs of wear. Pages may include limited notes and highlighting. May NOT include discs, access code or other supplemental materials.
Add this copy of Lasting City: the Anatomy of Nostalgia to cart. $2.95, very good condition, Sold by Alibris rated 5.0 out of 5 stars, ships from NV, USA, published 2013 by Liveright Publishing Corporation.
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Very good in very good dust jacket. Very Good, Top and bottom of spine lightly bumped. Remainder mark to bottom page edges., In very good dust jacket. Glued binding. Paper over boards. With dust jacket. 323 p. Contains: Illustrations, black & white, Frontispiece.
Add this copy of Lasting City: the Anatomy of Nostalgia to cart. $10.00, very good condition, Sold by Books End Bookshop rated 4.0 out of 5 stars, ships from SYRACUSE, NY, UNITED STATES, published 2013 by Liveright.
Add this copy of Lasting City: the Anatomy of Nostalgia to cart. $15.00, like new condition, Sold by Kubik Fine Books Ltd rated 5.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Dayton, OH, UNITED STATES, published 2013 by Liveright Publishing Corporation.
Add this copy of Lasting City: the Anatomy of Nostalgia to cart. $20.00, like new condition, Sold by Between the Covers-Rare Books rated 5.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Gloucester City, NJ, UNITED STATES, published 2013 by Liveright Publishing.
Add this copy of Lasting City; the Anatomy of Nostalgia to cart. $20.00, like new condition, Sold by Columbia Books rated 4.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Columbia, MO, UNITED STATES, published 2013 by Liveright.
Add this copy of Lasting City: the Anatomy of Nostalgia to cart. $33.08, good condition, Sold by Bonita rated 4.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Newport Coast, CA, UNITED STATES, published 2013 by Liveright.
Add this copy of Lasting City: the Anatomy of Nostalgia to cart. $63.26, new condition, Sold by Bonita rated 4.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Newport Coast, CA, UNITED STATES, published 2013 by Liveright.
