James McCourt 
Lasting City: The Anatomy of Nostalgia [EPUB ebook] 

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 Mc Court animates twentieth-century New York through a “kaleidoscope of sharp-edged, brilliantly colored memories” (J. D. Mc Clatchy) 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, Mc Court 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.

Om författaren

James Mc Court is the author of Mawrdew Czgowchwz, Time Remaining, Delancey’s Way, Now Voyagers: The Night Sea Journey and Queer Street. He has contributed to the Yale Review, The New Yorker, and the Paris Review. He lives in New York City and Washington, D.C.