While the first trilogy celebrated the carefree excesses of the seventies, this volume tracks its hapless, all-too-human cast across the eighties-a decade troubled by plague, deceit, and overweening ambition. Madrigal's beloved apartment house on Russian Hill. The nine classic comedies, some of which originally appeared as serials in San Francisco newspapers, have won Maupin critical acclaim around the world and enthralled legions of devoted fans.īack to Barbary Lane comprises the second omnibus of the series- Babycakes (1984), Significant Others (1987), and Sure of You (1989)-continuing the saga of the tenants, past and present, of Mrs. No matter what Maupin writes next, he can look back on the rare achievement of having built a little world and made it run.” -Walter Kendrick, Village Voice Literary SupplementĪrmistead Maupin's uproarious and moving Tales of the City novels have earned a unique niche in American literature and are considered indelible documents of cultural change from the seventies through the first two decades of the new millennium. “Tearing through one after the other, as I did, allows instant gratification it also lets you appreciate how masterfully they're constructed. By turns hilarious and heartbreaking, Armistead Maupin's bestselling Tales of the City novels-the fourth, fifth and sixth of which are collected in this second omnibus volume-stand as an incomparable blend of great storytelling and incisive social commentary on American culture from the seventies through the first two decades of the new millennium.
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I can't see an audience disposed to read Conrad being put off by the older name, and as it's more ingrained in the story it would be harder to move/translate.Ĭoincidence or something more s*n*ster - NoN is the only Conrad boook not digitised on Project Gutenberg. (I imagine most ppl here only knew the "indians" variation as a kid and found out about the change in the Christie book much later on if at all) XPOST, what Mark said about the film still racist, but a much less problematic word. I guess the christie estate thought it relatively unproblematic changing the title as there are probably many variations in the rhyme even at the time, and it would be less offensive for the newer audience it needed to reach in later time. In the conrad, James Wait (the nigger in question) is key to the way the characters behave and the general plot, whereas in the Christie, the niggers in question are not actually characers, it's just from a rhyme to symbolise the slow bumping off of characters. I gathered my unwanteds and piled them in the living room. In my apartment, it’s got so cluttered that sometimes, when I leave-usually to acquire more stuff-it crosses my mind that I should leave a “Dear Burglar” note, urging the intruder to help herself.Ī few months ago, I decided to deaccession an assortment of my things by whatever means feasible: selling, donating, recycling, giving them away, losing them on the subway, or reserving a spot for them on the next Mars Explorer. The son of a friend, when offered his pick of items from his grandfather’s estate-an antique clock? an Emmy?-took a toilet plunger. What to do with this First World surplus? Your children don’t want it. They have to dust it.” A survey conducted by the storage marketplace Neighbor found that quasi-house arrest has made seventy-eight per cent of respondents realize that they have more possessions than they need. “People are stuck in their houses and sick of their stuff,” Randy Sabin, who runs estate and Internet sales, told me over the phone from Morris, Connecticut. Lately, I, a maximalist, have been yearning to be a minimalist. |