New moon
By: Richard Grossinger
Publisher: Frog
Published: 1996
Place of publication: Berkeley, CA
Language: eng
Number of pages: 592
Subjects: Social life and customs; Family; Intellectual life; American Authors; Resorts; Homes and haunts; Family relationships; Childhood and youth
Description: In this nonfiction novel, Richard Grossinger leads the reader into the world of one child in New York of the 1950s and 1960s. Beginning from his earliest memories, he traces a path through grade school at P.S. 6, "group" in Central Park, and high school at Horace Mann, while recalling Freudian psychoanalysis, his father's hotel in the Catskills (Grossinger's), rebellion against Color War at Camp Chipinaw, and the mysterious world of tarot cards.

In the second half of New Moon he traverses the stages of adolescence and young manhood: college, summer jobs, dating, marriage, graduate school, and the birth of a first child. Grossinger's tale ends with anthropology fieldwork among Maine fishermen. An epilogue then describes how events of the subsequent two decades led to the writing of this book.

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New Moon is the most classic sort of tale, a simple narrative of a writer's life, but one so compelling and sincere that readers will find themselves experiencing their own forgotten selves. Grossinger evokes old comics, day camp in Central Park, the Yankees of the 1950s, rock and roll, college fraternities, the Mets' and Jets' 1969 championship seasons, lobsterfishing wharves, and the Hopi Indians of the Third Mesa.

Beneath this shifting, cinematic landscape he unveils layers of internal dialogue, dreams, self-witnessing, and personal myth-making, exposing the mechanism of an act we all do (whether publicly or silently) and rarely acknowledge - telling our own story to others and to ourselves. At the same time, he summons the mystery of life itself - the many trances through which consciousness travels in its journey toward self-awareness.