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John Rechy

Autor von Nacht in der Stadt. Roman.

28+ Werke 2,440 Mitglieder 24 Rezensionen Lieblingsautor von 8 Lesern

Über den Autor

Rechy is an important gay writer also linked to the Beat Movement, whose work has been recognized by a number of prestigious grant nominations or awards, including one from the National Endowment for the Arts. He grew up in El Paso, Texas, in a poor, Mexican American family. Because of his poverty mehr anzeigen and his ethnic heritage, he learned very early in life to feel himself an outsider, which was intensified by his later experiences as a gay hustler traveling America in search of his social and sexual identity. He came to popular and critical attention with his first published novel, City of Night (1963), which was a bestseller and was nominated for the International Prix Formentor. A fictionalized account of his travels, the novel focuses on the people whom the unnamed narrator encounters on the hustling scene in a number of cities, including New York, San Francisco, New Orleans, Chicago, and Los Angeles. Together, these cities make up the titular "city of night," or, as Rechy writes, "the city of night of the soul." A state of mind rather than a particular place, this "city"---modern America---is where hypocrisy and homophobia are reconciled with the fact of homosexuality in various forms, and poverty may be more spiritual than material. The book owes something to two classics: Jack Kerouac's Beat novel, On the Road, which celebrates countercultural alternatives to middle-class culture and lifestyles, including bourgeois marriage and family life, and Djuna Barnes's modernist novel Nightwood, which explores a tragic gay "nightworld" as a symbol of the modern urban wasteland. Rechy addresses similar themes in a later work that is equally well known, The Sexual Outlaw (1977), which he has described as an experiment with the novel form. Ostensibly a documentary of the life of a gay man, the book is also a critique of American values and morality. Commentaries throughout the text are really journalistic essays that expose the double standards and double binds of a "closeted" culture, in which many fear to be openly gay because of homophobic reprisals. Rechy has suggested that all of his work (which includes plays, essays, and reviews, as well as novels) articulates the need to preserve gay "difference," which he associates with "abundant sexuality," in the face of increasing "heterofascism." (Bowker Author Biography) weniger anzeigen

Beinhaltet die Namen: J. Rechy, RECHY JOHN

Bildnachweis: from author's website

Werke von John Rechy

Nacht in der Stadt. Roman. (1963) 1,012 Exemplare
Numbers (1966) 225 Exemplare
Rushes (1979) 138 Exemplare
The Coming of the Night (1999) 105 Exemplare
Bodies and Souls (1983) 101 Exemplare
The Fourth Angel (1777) 73 Exemplare
The Vampires (1971) 62 Exemplare
This Day's Death (1969) 48 Exemplare
After the Blue Hour (2017) 39 Exemplare
Marilyn's Daughter (1988) 33 Exemplare

Zugehörige Werke

The Stonewall Reader (2019) — Mitwirkender — 338 Exemplare
Men on Men 4: Best New Gay Fiction (1990) — Mitwirkender — 195 Exemplare
The Columbia Anthology of Gay Literature (1998) — Mitwirkender — 158 Exemplare
Gay Sunshine Interviews. Vol. 1 (1978) — Interviewee — 60 Exemplare
The Norton Anthology of Latino Literature (2010) — Mitwirkender — 58 Exemplare
New American Story (1962) — Mitwirkender — 48 Exemplare
Big Table 3 (1959) — Mitwirkender — 6 Exemplare

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I did not enjoy reading this book, so I stopped at 21% through it. It's difficult to say anything good about it.
 
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BrianEWilliams | Nov 30, 2022 |
'City of Night' can be a difficult book to get into. We follow a nameless narrator, after a brief and significant look at his childhood in El Paso and education, as he experiences the hustling scenes of New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago and New Orleans. The novel was an understandable sensation when it came out in 1963. It is a completely unapologetic, vivid, and compassionate look at gay male life in the 1950s. We have only one main character, but many of the people he fleetingly comes into contact with have a sense of authenticity to them. Miss Destiny in particular was a favorite, but from The Professor to Jeremy there were so many lessons to learn. The book is saturated with the self-loathing of the narrator, a feeling shared by most if not all of the characters here, and Rechy shows the feeling for the trap it is.

Rechy may not consider himself a beat writer, but he was of that generation and the prose here is stripped of apostrophes and many words are compounded, like the ubiquitous youngman or sexhunger, which helps the stream-of-conciousness flow. Of the many significant secondary characters that our youngman interacts with, a common theme emerges of self-deception, denial, and fear of trust. This is a portrait of a community on the edge of something. They just want to have a good time, be themselves, are (mostly) not bothering anybody not asking for it, but are pushed around by cops, taken advantage of by those with power, and are left vulnerable so only the cautious and hardbitten survive. None escape without trauma. The novel is tragedy, but there are scenes here where Rechy shows the rebellion that's coming.

This is not a happy novel. There is something like a silver-lining involved to the journey, but this book is more significant for it's portrayal of queer men and trans women across a spectrum. There are a few female characters, not enough, but the choice makes sense considering the novel is centered on gay sex work. 'City of Night' shows the gay community as being a broad, fractured entity. As diverse in appearance and behavior as everybody else. I'm stunned by it. Unlike so many other novels of the midcentury, this is a distinctly American classic that deserves continued attention.
… (mehr)
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ManWithAnAgenda | 8 weitere Rezensionen | Jun 26, 2021 |
USA, Los Angeles, ca 1965
En ung mand, Johnny Rio, kører rundt i Los Angeles området og bliver brugt og bruger selv en masse mænd seksuelt. Christopher Isherwood og Don Bachardy er forlæg for et par af personerne (og Don Bachardy syntes dårligt om det).

???
 
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bnielsen | 2 weitere Rezensionen | Feb 9, 2019 |
This is the first novel John Rechy published, based on his life as a hustler. Not one city--adventures take place in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, San Francisco and New Orleans--but the hustling scene of masculine hustlers, queens, scores and vice cops is similar in all these places. The protagonist is torn between the world of education, career and writing, which he has worked to gain admittance to, and the attractions of confirming his desirability in the simplest possible fashion: being paid for access to his body.… (mehr)
1 abstimmen
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ritaer | 8 weitere Rezensionen | Mar 15, 2018 |

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