Lasting City
Subtitle: the Anatomy of Nostalgia
By: James McCourt
Edition: First edition.
Publisher: Liveright Publishing Corporation, a division of W.W. Norton & Company
Published: 2013
Language: eng
Number of pages: 323
ISBN-13: 9780871404589
Subjects: Childhood and youth
Description: 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.
Notes: Includes index.