≫ Read Tales of the City Armistead Maupin 9780552998765 Books

Tales of the City Armistead Maupin 9780552998765 Books

Download As PDF : Tales of the City Armistead Maupin 9780552998765 Books

Tales of the City Armistead Maupin 9780552998765 Books

Set in San Francisco and comprised of a hundred or so very short chapters, Armistad Maupin creates an ensemble of interesting characters trying to find themselves a half-decade after the Summer of Love but a lifetime before AIDS, cellphones, the internet or Donald Trump.

This was the perfect book for me to read after the emotionally draining experience of “A Little Life.” Breezy, but poignant. The book is a time capsule of the 70s and it shows how much things have changed and how little.


Tags : Tales of the City [Armistead Maupin] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. Tales of the City,Armistead Maupin,Tales of the City,HarperCollins Publishers,0552998761,Fiction,General,Modern fiction

Tales of the City Armistead Maupin 9780552998765 Books Reviews

Hampstead Maupin was politically incorrect before anyone had ever heard the term-and unapologetically so. The author writes about the LGBTQ culture in the early 1970's San Francisco when gay was the term that included a transsexual landlady, homosexual male tenant who aspired to be a kept woman, a Fundamentalist set of parents who couldn't see the forest for the trees when they came from Florida to visit their son, a female fashion model who identified as black so that she would be more marketable even though both biological parents were Lily white, a lesbian tenant who wanted to revive her relationship with the black model, a homosexual male OBGYN WHO had a sexual encounter with a virile captain of industry whose wife had just come to see the doctor about getting an abortion, and tying everything together is an innocent young Secretary from Cleveland who quickly discovered that she and her little dog Toto were no longer in Kansas. If you are able to set aside your preconceived prejudices for a short while, you are in for the ride of your life. There are five more books in Maupin's Tales of the City series, but I might just stop where I finished at the end of the first book because the other five could not possibly be as much fun.
Fantastic book if you know San Francisco and want to look at a period of time when the clouds of 68 and Vietnam had subsided and the fear of the AIDS plague had not yet come. Helped me appreciate my city that much more.
I remember when this was running in the San Francisco _Chronicle_ as a serial. (Not to be confused with _The Serial_, which ran in the _Chron_ a year or so earlier and was about Marin County...) I chose not to read it then, though we _had_ a subscription to the _Comical_; I read a few columns and didn't get into it.

So what is it?

_Tales_ chronicles (see what I did there?) the lives, loves, lusts, heartbreaks, and minor irritations of a dozen or so people living in and around San Francisco in the mid-to-late 1970s.

Most of the characters center around 28 Barbary Lane, a small apartment house run by one Anna Madrigal. Mrs. (she insists on it though, she says, she's never been married) Madrigal is a motherly, free-spirited woman who grows weed in the back yard and names all the plants. (We eventually learn, or _may_ learn, that she has Secrets and that her name is an anagram (of what?).)

What it is, then, is, well, a soap opera. The serialized format turns into chapters of (usually) three or four pages, each of which extends the stories of (typically) one or two of the major characters. Like a soap opera - but also like Dickens, for Heaven's sake - the plot runs heavily on coincidence. One character's gynecologist turns out to be another's love interest, that sort of thing.

Give Maupin credit for this his characters run a fairly wide spectrum of social "levels," from the unemployed to the millionaire social-register class, and, somehow, they all interact plausibly if not quite believably. Each is motivated by their own personal and social imperatives, and we learn enough of their motivations to empathize with them - with the exception of Mrs. Madrigal , who remains a delicious mystery.

The writing is light and fluffy and humorous without ever descending into satire or silliness, either of which would rob the characters of their identities.

It's enjoyable enough that I read it in two days, but I don't feel particularly compelled to read the (8) sequels.
How did I manage to come this far in life without having discovered Armistead Maupins wonderful city, characters, stories? In.way, however, I’m sort glad am sort of glad I’m just now discovering, because I can binge read them all at once, without having to endure the wait time between publications. SO hooked for the next six books!
THIS REVIEW ADDRESSES ERRORS IN THE BOOK, NOT THE BOOK CONTENT. OTHERS HAVE COMPLAINED OF THE SAME THING, BUT I WANTED TO ADD MY OPINION.
Many words in this book have been "replaced" by auto-correction with incorrect words. It is distracting and irritating, there are so many!! For example, a chapter should be called "Mittelschmerz" -- it was replaced by ETHELMERTZ. She is a character from the old I Love Lucy show!! Ridiculous!! This is just one example of many in the book. I imagine the problem lies with the publisher. I haven't had this problem with other books, some from the same publisher. With the prices of the books being about the same as a physical book, this is unacceptable. This makes look bad. This is the 4th book in a series of 9. I planned to read them all, but am afraid that some of them will be like this one. It is very difficult to enjoy the book with so many errors.

outsourcing customer service is not working well, in my case. I was told to re-download the book, and of course it is the same. I was promised a $5.00 credit as a gesture of "good will." I have not received that credit. This is my worst experience with . It is probably a publishing mistake, but to sell the books at physical book price and have these errors is UNACCEPTABLE.
I bet the author would not take kindly to having his words mangled!!! I may write him about it. At this point I want my money back.
Set in San Francisco and comprised of a hundred or so very short chapters, Armistad Maupin creates an ensemble of interesting characters trying to find themselves a half-decade after the Summer of Love but a lifetime before AIDS, cellphones, the internet or Donald Trump.

This was the perfect book for me to read after the emotionally draining experience of “A Little Life.” Breezy, but poignant. The book is a time capsule of the 70s and it shows how much things have changed and how little.