{"title":"James Mccourt","description":"\u003cp\u003e0\u003c\/p\u003e","products":[{"product_id":"lasting-city-book-james-mccourt-9780871408440","title":"Lasting City","description":"“The blood-red of Manhattan, the brilliant green of an Irish-American wake, the blue-rinsed divas of the opera and the bathhouse alike” (Michael Gorra) are hypnotically rendered in this “astoundingly smart book” (John Waters). With some of the most lyrical cadences in recent literature, the legendary James McCourt animates twentieth-century New York through a “kaleidoscope of sharp-edged, brilliantly colored memories” (J. D. McClatchy) and with “dynamic prose and high-brow erudition that has gone the way of the dodo” (Publishers Weekly). Braiding a nostalgic portrait of the eternal city with a boy’s funny, guttersnipe precocity and outrageous coming-of-age in the 1940s and 1950s, McCourt revisits the fantasy city of his youth with Proustian memories of steam calliopes in Central Park, Hiroshima “obliterated in a flash of light,” and closing his mother’s eyes for the last time. As sensational as it is satisfying, Lasting City, a profoundly American work, identifies the spot where genius and madness meet.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49615544811793,"sku":"GOR011720009","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0871408449.jpg?v=1751363622"},{"product_id":"now-voyagers-book-james-mccourt-9781933527086","title":"Now Voyagers","description":"Now Voyagers is the long-awaited sequel to James McCourt's first novel, the comic masterpiece Mawrdew Czgowchwz (pronounced mardu gorgeous). About James McCourt and his earlier work, Susan Sontag wrote Bravo, James McCourt, a literary countertenor in the exacting tradition of Firbank and Nabokov, who makes his daringly self-assured debut with this intelligent and funny book.''","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49646325530897,"sku":"GOR013636050","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51056012656913,"sku":"NIN9781933527086","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":51096164598033,"sku":"CIN1933527080G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":51694172569873,"sku":"CIN1933527080VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52126560518417,"sku":"NLS9781933527086","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1933527080.jpg?v=1750965368"},{"product_id":"queer-street-the-rise-and-fall-of-an-american-culture-1947-1985-book-james-mccourt-9780393050516","title":"Queer Street: The Rise and Fall of an American Culture, 1947-1985","description":"Beginning with the influx of liberated veterans into downtown New York in the golden age before McCarthyism, Queer Street tells the explosive story of gay culture in the latter half of the twentieth century. Coming out himself in the \"buttoned-up\/button-down\" 1950s, McCourt positions his own experience against the whirlwind history of the era, summoning a pageant of characters that includes Harry Hay, Judy Garland, Tennessee Williams, Gore Vidal, and Truman Capote. In a learned but lively voice, McCourt highlights the major events of the period: the landmark eruption at the Stonewall Inn, the AIDS crisis that brought an end to a century of bathhouse culture, the ascendancy of the Christian right, and finally the social acceptance of gays that paradoxically marked the demise of queer culture. \"Not since Truman Capote's Black and White Ball has there been such a gala collection of sacred monsters, feathered masks, icy pearls, chiseled remarks and bitchy mots all in one glamorous setting....An astonishing book, at once hilarious and touching.\"J. D. McClatchy","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50031895281937,"sku":"CIN0393050513G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50202273513745,"sku":"CIN0393050513VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ WELL_READ \/ SBYB","offer_id":50352661070097,"sku":"CIN0393050513A","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0393050513.jpg?v=1751134207"},{"product_id":"queer-street-book-james-mccourt-9780393326406","title":"Queer Street","description":"A fierce critical intelligence animates every page of Queer Street. Its sentences are dizzying divagations. The postwar generation of queer New York has found a sophisticated bard singing 'the elders' history' (The New York Times). James McCourt's seminal Queer Street has proven unrivaled in its ability to capture the voices of a mad, bygone era. Beginning with the influx of liberated veterans into downtown New York and barreling through four decades of crisis and triumph up to the era of the floodtide of AIDS, McCourt positions his own exhilarating experience against the whirlwind history of the era. The result is a commanding and persuasive interlocking of personal, intellectual, and social history that will be read, dissected, and honored as the masterpiece it is for decades to come. A Publishers Weekly Best Book of 2003; a Lambda Award finalist.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":50129444536593,"sku":"GOR007220868","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50349044793617,"sku":"CIN0393326403G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":51291906769169,"sku":"NGR9780393326406","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0393326403.jpg?v=1751134342"},{"product_id":"mawrdew-czgowchwz-book-james-mccourt-9780940322974","title":"Mawrdew Czgowchwz","description":"Diva Mawrdew Czgowchwz (pronounced Mardu Gorgeous) bursts like the most brilliant of comets onto the international opera scene, only to confront the deadly malice and black magic of her rivals. Outrageous and uproarious, flamboyant and serious as only the most perfect frivolity can be, James McCourt's entrancing send-up of the world of opera has been a cult classic for more than a quarter-century. This comic tribute to the love of art is a triumph of art and love by a contemporary American master.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50327661347089,"sku":"CIN0940322978G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":50597266456849,"sku":"GOR002999890","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":51424327106833,"sku":"CIN0940322978VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ LIKE_NEW \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":51521850605841,"sku":"GOR014314067","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0940322978.jpg?v=1750947724"},{"product_id":"delancey-s-way-book-james-mccourt-9780375403118","title":"Delancey's Way","description":null,"brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ WELL_READ \/ SBYB","offer_id":50329425936657,"sku":"CIN0375403116A","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":51327492129041,"sku":"CIN0375403116VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":52621888356625,"sku":"CIN0375403116G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0375403116.jpg?v=1750739997"},{"product_id":"lasting-city-book-james-mccourt-9780871404589","title":"Lasting City","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. Mating fact with fantasy, or fantasy with fact, McCourt takes us from his deeply moving bedside account of his mother Catherine's death to its traumatic aftermaths both real and imagined, which are-as McCourt tells it-equally real. He revisits the fantasy city of his youth, sometimes in soliloquy, as well as in the plaintive threnody of an older man who recounts his tales of woe to a Hindu cabdriver named Pramit Banarjee on Broadway, only hours after leaving his mother's bedside. By celebrating our powerlessness over memory, he explores the darkly intense Irish-American family romance and the love-hate relationship between an unusually bright boy and his eternally wise mother, who harbored an excruciating guilty secret.     With Joycean panache, McCourt then takes us to the wake, where his aunts recall their sister as if they are the Fates; he has a late-night dialogue with a former showgirl turned hash-slinging waitress; and he then anticipates his own death with the some of the most lyrical cadences in recent literature, wondering whether his ashes will be scattered on the waters of that little rivulet emerging from Central Park's Ramble, where in his grandfather's day, real Venetian gondoliers, imported from Venice, plied their trade.     Reflecting McCourt's belief that the perfectly diagrammed sentence has become the secret weapon of nice people, Lasting City, written as much for the ear as the reading eye, unfolds in multiple voices that are at times like theater and at times the reverie of a mind lost in memory. It is a heartfelt aria to a lost time and to an eternal city.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50371044737297,"sku":"CIN0871404583G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50405624971537,"sku":"CIN0871404583VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0871404583.jpg?v=1751108416"},{"product_id":"time-remaining-book-james-mccourt-9781608643097","title":"Time Remaining","description":null,"brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":51039274402065,"sku":"","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51039277121809,"sku":"NIN9781608643097","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52481887174929,"sku":"NLS9781608643097","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1608643093.jpg?v=1751088141"},{"product_id":"time-remaining-book-james-mccourt-9780679412663","title":"Time Remaining","description":"\u003cp\u003eWell, it just sings. -Susan Sontag\u003c\/p\u003e'Drugs, dick, disco, and dish-remember?' That's how the drag queen Miss Mae Mae describes the good times in James McCourt's 1993 novel, \u003cem\u003eTime Remaining\u003c\/em\u003e. She is on her deathbed, clutching a stuffed bear, and she marvels at how suddenly those words have been replaced by 'dysentery, dementia, despair, and death.' Miss Mae Mae's final quip is relayed by Odette O'Doyle, a 'polymath drag-queen diva, ' to Daniel Delancey, an orphaned performance artist, as they ride the midnight train to Montauk. Odette and Delancey are the sole survivors of a raucous group of drag queens called the Eleven Against Heaven, which AIDS has decimated. Odette has just returned from depositing the ashes of the Eleven in various European bodies of water: Miss Mae Mae in the Rhine, Miss Faith Healy in the Liffey, Miss Charity Ward 'upon still waters in the fjord at  lesund. As she recounts the rites for Delancey, she immerses us in stories of the Eleven, and surfaces a singular history of mid-century queer New York. -\u003cem\u003eThe New Yorker\u003c\/em\u003eMcCourt is that rarest of contemporary American authors-a true iconoclast, a devoted high stylist, and a holder of the unfashionable opinion that prose is a natural extrovert and beauty that deserves the brightest polish, the best accessories, the most extravagant costumes. -Dennis Cooper, author of \u003cem\u003eCloser\u003c\/em\u003e and \u003cem\u003eFrisk\u003c\/em\u003eWhat makes \u003cem\u003eTime Remaining\u003c\/em\u003e an extraordinary animal among so many, varied gay books that came to life in the 1970s, 80s and 90s? It's a celebration of the survival instincts that define gay life. The use of dark humor is the building and defense of our semantic canon which results in an aggressively earned comfort with the world. -Tim Young, from his introduction to the new edition James McCourt is the author of multiple works of fiction and nonfiction. He is best known for his acclaimed 1971 debut novel \u003cem\u003eMawrdew Czgowchwz\u003c\/em\u003e (pronounced Mardu Gorgeous) which is currently available with the \u003cem\u003eNew York Review Books\u003c\/em\u003e Classics imprint. \u003cem\u003eQueer Street: The Rise and Fall of an American Culture, 1947-85\u003c\/em\u003e, published in 2003, was identified by The \u003cem\u003eNew York Times\u003c\/em\u003e as an heroically imaginative account of gay metropolitan culture, an elegy and an apologia for a generation. Tim Young has been thinking and writing about the role of literature and music in the narrative of life for many decades. In addition to a series of essays on popular culture for \u003cem\u003eDesign Observer\u003c\/em\u003e, he has contributed work for\u003cem\u003e The Yale Review\u003c\/em\u003e.\u003cbr\u003e","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":52988230631697,"sku":"CIN0679412662G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ WELL_READ \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":53022880891153,"sku":"GOR010963450","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":53236991000849,"sku":"CIN0679412662VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9780679412663.jpg?v=1767381315"}],"url":"https:\/\/www.worldofbooks.com\/en-au\/collections\/author-books-by-james-mccourt.oembed","provider":"World of Books ","version":"1.0","type":"link"}