Tales of the City
A Novel
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4.2 • 302 Ratings
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
A PBS Great American Read Top 100 Pick
The first novel in the beloved Tales of the City series, Armistead Maupin’s bestselling San Francisco saga, and inspiration for the Netflix original series, Tales of the City
“A consummate entertainer who has made a generation laugh. . . . It is Maupin’s Dickensian gift to be able to render love convincingly.”— Edmund White, Times Literary Supplement
For almost four decades Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City has blazed its own trail through popular culture—from a groundbreaking newspaper serial to a classic novel, to a television event that entranced millions around the world. The first of ten novels about the denizens of the mythic apartment house at 28 Barbary Lane, Tales is both a sparkling comedy of manners and an indelible portrait of an era that changed forever the way we live.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
With its colorful references to mood rings, macramé, people’s churches, and consciousness-raising groups, Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City is a time capsule of the swinging ’70s in San Francisco. But the tender, meandering novel about the interconnected lives of the eclectic residents of 28 Barbary Lane—a groovy rooming house—and some of the city’s more well-to-do (and messed-up) residents is a timeless love letter to urban life and community. Originally presented as a serialized newspaper column, Tales of the City spun off into a wildly popular series of stand-alone books chronicling the lives of characters like Michael Tolliver (a sweet, romantic gay man from the South), Mary Ann Singleton (a sheltered Midwestern girl desperate to broaden her horizons), and Anna Madrigal, the wonderfully uninhibited landlady who watches over her young tenants.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Maupin's alternately playful and sentimental tales depict an all-too-easily satirized population of transients and toffs living in and around San Francisco.
Customer Reviews
Quick, easy, and entertaining read!
Loved this book and can't wait to get started on the next. It definitely pulls you in and you will find yourself saying "Just a few more pages" into the late hours of the night.
Excellent book, but too many mistakes in the e-book!
This is a thoroughly entertaining book that deserves a place in just about everyone's library. Regrettably, someone rushed the e-book through production. The e-book is littered with errors: spaces between words are eliminated, words are misspelled, entire lines are missing. It's as if someone ran the paper book through an OCR program and didn't care enough to proofread it after. I asked for my money back! If Armistead Maupin has an iPad, I bet he's embarrassed by the lack of quality control. We need Apple to tell the publishers (HarperCollins in this case) to do a better job of copyediting and formatting older texts!
A fast funny but twisty soap opera
Life in San Francisco. Everyone should live there for a time. If you don't get that chance, at least try it vicariously through these stories!