Tales of the City (Tales of the City #1) in Queereaders

Apr 17, 2019 Jesse rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: 1970-s, american-lit, queer-lit, cityscapes-and-the-urban, read-in-2019

I'm coming up to my ten year anniversary as a San Francisco resident, so it seemed high time to give our city's urtext a go (well that, and I was invited to a film festival screening of the first episode of the upcoming Netflix series). I admit it took an unexpectedly long time to nudge myself onto its wavelength: I realized I had always assumed it was a gay text (it really isn't), and found Maupin's prose style surprisingly flat, even when taking into consideration the format restrictions of it ...more

15 likes · Like · see review

Jul 15, 2012 Jan rated it liked it

Deliciously dated to my childhood/adolescence in the seventies, this book was more enjoyable for the flashes of recognition of seventies brands and movements and of places I know in San Francisco than for characterization, plot, or writing, all of which were facile but thin. Nor did the queer characters bear any particular resemblance to anyone I've known in my life. It's a good old-fashioned genre soap opera, and I might read the next volume (*More Tales of the City*) someday as a guilty pleasu ...more

2 likes · Like · see review

Jul 19, 2009 Julia rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: favorites, reread, contemporary-fiction, glbtq, journalism, mhbc, best-book-i-read-in-2015

I really, really love this novel. I assume I’ve read this novel at least three times and possibly many more. I never lived in Russian Hill, where the mythical 28 Barbary Lane is, but I have been to many of the places in the novel. It came out originally, as a novel, the year before I moved to San Francisco, but Maupin was still writing his column in the San Francisco Chronicle that would become More Tales of the City and Further Tales of the City --and all other books in the series—when I lived ...more

1 like · Like · see review