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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.
Set in the early 1990s, the long-awaited tenth novel in Armistead Maupin's beloved and enduring Tales of the City series follows the adventures of Mona Ramsey, now the widowed Lady of a glorious old manor in Britain's golden Cotswolds, and her fabulous adopted son Wilfred, as they come to the aid of an American visitor with a troubling secret.
When Mona Ramsey married Lord Teddy Roughton to secure his visa--allowing him to remain in San Francisco to fulfill his wildest dreams--she never imagined she would, by age 48, be the sole owner of Easley House, Teddy's grand, romantic country manor in the UK. She also didn't imagine that she'd need to open the manor's doors to paying guests to afford the electric bill and repair the leaking roof. Yet somehow she and her young friend Wilfred--whom guests assume is serving as Easley's charming-but-clumsy butler--and the loopy old gardener Mr. Hargis, are making it work.
This delicate equilibrium is upended when Americans Rhonda and Ernie Blaylock arrive for a weekend vacation at Easley, and Wilfred stumbles onto their terrible secret. Now, instead of being able to focus on the imminent arrival of her old friend Michael Tolliver and beloved parent Anna Madrigal, Mona will need to focus all of her considerable charm, willpower, and wiles--and the help of Wilfred and Mona's girlfriend Poppy, the town's postmistress and local calligraphy whiz--to set things right before the Midsummer ceremony when the whole town will descend on Easley's historic grounds.
Set in the early 1990s, the long-awaited tenth novel in Armistead Maupin's beloved and enduring Tales of the City series follows the adventures of Mona Ramsey, now the widowed Lady of a glorious old manor in Britain's golden Cotswolds, and her fabulous adopted son Wilfred, as they come to the aid of an American visitor with a troubling secret.
When Mona Ramsey married Lord Teddy Roughton to secure his visa--allowing him to remain in San Francisco to fulfill his wildest dreams--she never imagined she would, by age 48, be the sole owner of Easley House, Teddy's grand, romantic country manor in the UK. She also didn't imagine that she'd need to open the manor's doors to paying guests to afford the electric bill and repair the leaking roof. Yet somehow she and her young friend Wilfred--whom guests assume is serving as Easley's charming-but-clumsy butler--and the loopy old gardener Mr. Hargis, are making it work.
This delicate equilibrium is upended when Americans Rhonda and Ernie Blaylock arrive for a weekend vacation at Easley, and Wilfred stumbles onto their terrible secret. Now, instead of being able to focus on the imminent arrival of her old friend Michael Tolliver and beloved parent Anna Madrigal, Mona will need to focus all of her considerable charm, willpower, and wiles--and the help of Wilfred and Mona's girlfriend Poppy, the town's postmistress and local calligraphy whiz--to set things right before the Midsummer ceremony when the whole town will descend on Easley's historic grounds.
Armistead Maupin's uproarious and moving Tales of the City novels--the first three of which are collected in this omnibus volume--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.
These novels are as difficult to put down as a dish of pistachios. The reader starts playing the old childhood game of 'Just one more chapter and I'll turn out the lights, ' only to look up and discover it's after midnight.--Los Angeles Times Book Review
Originally serialized in the San Francisco Chronicle, Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City (1978), More Tales of the City (1980), and Further Tales of the City (1982) afforded a mainstream audience of millions its first exposure to straight and gay characters experiencing on equal terms the follies of urban life.
Among the cast of this groundbreaking saga are the lovelorn residents of 28 Barbary Lane: the bewildered but aspiring Mary Ann Singleton, the libidinous Brian Hawkins; Mona Ramsey, still in a sixties trance, Michael Mouse Tolliver, forever in bright-eyed pursuit of Mr. Right; and their marijuana-growing landlady, the indefatigable Mrs. Madrigal.
Hurdling barriers both social and sexual, Maupin leads them through heartbreak and triumph, through nail-biting terrors and gleeful coincidences. The result is a glittering and addictive comedy of manners that continues to beguile new generations of readers.
Inspiration for the Netflix Limited Series, Tales of the City
The second novel in the beloved Tales of the City series, Armistead Maupin's best-selling San Francisco saga.
The tenants of 28 Barbary Lane have fled their cozy nest for adventures far afield. Mary Ann Singleton finds love at sea with a forgetful stranger, Mona Ramsey discovers her doppelgänger in a desert whorehouse, and Michael Tolliver bumps into his favorite gynecologist in a Mexican bar. Meanwhile, their venerable landlady takes the biggest journey of all--without ever leaving home.
Inspiration for the Netflix Limited Series, Tales of the City
The third novel in the beloved Tales of the City series, Armistead Maupin's best-selling San Francisco saga.
The calamity-prone residents of 28 Barbary Lane are at it again in this deliciously dark novel of romance and betrayal. While Anna Madrigal imprisons an anchorwoman in her basement, Michael Tolliver looks for love at the National Gay Rodeo, DeDe Halcyon Day and Mary Ann Singleton track a charismatic psychopath across Alaska, and society columnist Prue Giroux loses her heart to a derelict living in a San Francisco park.
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.
Tearing through [the tales] one after the other, as I did, allows instant gratification; it also lets you appreciate how masterfully they're constructed. 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 Supplement
Armistead 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. The nine classic comedies, some of which originally appeared as serials in San Francisco newspapers, won Maupin critical acclaim around the world and enthralled legions of devoted fans.
Back 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. Madrigal's beloved apartment house on Russian Hill. 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.
Like its companion volumes, 28 Barbary Lane and Goodbye, Barbary Lane, Back to Barbary Lane is distinguished by what The Guardian of London has called some of the sharpest and most speakable dialogue you are ever likely to read.
These final days of his San Francisco friends and lovers, gay and straight, are seriously moving. . . . Maupin deftly illustrates how far America and the pioneering Anna have come, and nearly forty years into the series, his writing remains wildly addictive but is deeper and richer.--People
By turns hilarious and heartbreaking, Armistead Maupin's bestselling Tales of the City novels--books 7, 8 and 9 collected in this third 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.
Maupin's bestselling epic series spans the decade before the AIDS crisis through the era of marriage equality, and follows an unforgettable cast of characters whose diverse sexual identities helped set the social stage for the ongoing sexual revolution.
Goodbye Barbary Lane--comprised of Michael Tolliver Lives, Mary Ann in Autumn, and The Days of Anna Madrigal--joins two companion omnibus volumes, 28 Barbary Lane and Back to Barbary Lane, and is a must-have for fans of Maupin and the beloved series.
A quietly understated masterpiece. --USA Today
The sixth novel in the beloved Tales of the City series, Armistead Maupin's bestselling San Francisco saga.
A fiercely ambitious TV talk show host finds she must choose between national stardom in New York and a husband and child in San Francisco. Caught in the middle is their longtime friend, a gay man whose own future is even more uncertain. Wistful and compassionate yet subversively funny, Sure of You is a pitch-perfect novel in Maupin's legendary series.
Maupin's San Francisco saga careens beautifully on. --New York Times Book Review
The fourth novel in the beloved Tales of the City series, Armistead Maupin's best-selling San Francisco saga.
When an ordinary househusband and his ambitious wife decide to start a family, they discover there's more to making a baby than meets the eye. Help arrives in the form of a grieving gay neighbor, a visiting monarch, and the dashing young lieutenant who defects from her yacht. Bittersweet and profoundly affecting, Babycakes was the first piece of fiction to acknowledge the arrival of AIDS.
With rare authority, humor and stunning grace, Armistead Maupin (Tales of the City) explores the risks and consolations of intimacy while illuminating the mysteries of the storytelling impulse. Noone's will to make the world more gorgeous, dramatic and satisfying than it is betrays much about the measure of the human heart. --Chicago Tribune
I'm a fabulist by trade, warns Gabriel Noone, a late-night radio storyteller, as he begins to untangle the skeins of his tumultuous life: his crumbling ten-year love affair, his disaffection from his Southern father, his longtime weakness for ignoring reality. Gabriel's most sympathetic listener is Pete Lomax, a thirteen-year-old fan in Wisconsin whose own horrific past has left him wise and generous beyond his years. But when this virtual father-son relationship is rocked by doubt, a desperate search for the truth ensues. Welcome to the complex, vertiginous world of The Night Listener....
Inspiration for the Netflix Limited Series, Tales of the City
The fifth novel in the beloved Tales of the City series, Armistead Maupin's best-selling San Francisco saga.
Tranquillity reigns in the ancient redwood forest until a women-only music festival sets up camp downriver from an all-male retreat for the ruling class. Among those entangled in the ensuing mayhem are a lovesick nurseryman, a panic-stricken philanderer, and the world's most beautiful fat woman. Significant Others is Armistead Maupin's cunningly observed meditation on marriage, friendship, and sexual nostalgia.
Inspiration for the Netflix Limited Series, Tales of the City
The eighth novel in the beloved Tales of the City series, Armistead Maupin's best-selling San Francisco saga.
Following the success of his New York Times bestseller Michael Tolliver Lives, Armistead Maupin's Mary Ann in Autumn is a touching portrait of friendship, family, and fresh starts, as the City by the Bay welcomes back Mary Ann Singleton, the beloved Tales of the City heroine who started it all. A new chapter begins in the lives of both Mary Ann and Michael Mouse Tolliver when she returns to San Francisco to rejoin her oldest friend after years in New York City... the reunion that fans of Maupin's beloved Tales of the City series have been awaiting for years.
Inspiration for the Netflix Limited Series, Tales of the City
The seventh novel in the beloved Tales of the City series, Armistead Maupin's best-selling San Francisco saga.
Nearly two decades after ending his groundbreaking Tales of the City saga of San Francisco life, Armistead Maupin revisits his all-too-human hero Michael Tolliver--the fifty-five-year-old sweet-spirited gardener and survivor of the plague that took so many of his friends and lovers--for a single day at once mundane and extraordinary... and filled with the everyday miracles of living.
All of 31 inches tall, Cady is a true survivor in a town where -- as she says -- you can die of encouragement. Her early starring role as a lovable elf in an immensely popular American film proved a major disappointment, since moviegoers never saw the face behind the stifling rubber suit she was required to wear. Now, after a decade of hollow promises from the Industry, she is reduced to performing at birthday parties and bat mitzvahs as she waits for the miracle that will finally make her a star.
In a series of mordantly funny journal entries, Maupin tracks his spunky heroine across the saffron-hazed wasteland of Los Angeles -- from her all-too-infrequent meetings with agents and studio moguls to her regular harrowing encounters with small children, large dogs and human ignorance. Then one day a lanky piano player saunters into Cady's life, unleashing heady new emotions, and she finds herself going for broke, shooting the moon with a scheme so harebrained and daring that it just might succeed. Her accomplice in the venture is her best friend, Jeff, a gay waiter who sees Cady's struggle for visibility as a natural extension of his own war against the Hollywood Closet.
As clear-eyed as it is charming, Maybe the Moon is a modern parable about the mythology of the movies and the toll it exacts from it participants on both sides of the screen. It is a work that speaks to the resilience of the human spirit from a perspective rarely found in literature.
Inspiration for the Netflix Limited Series, Tales of the City
The eighth novel in the beloved Tales of the City series, Armistead Maupin's best-selling San Francisco saga.
The Days of Anna Madrigal, the suspenseful, comic, and touching novel, follows one of modern literature's most unforgettable and enduring characters--Anna Madrigal, the legendary transgender landlady of 28 Barbary Lane--as she embarks on a road trip that will take her deep into her past.
Now ninety-two, and committed to the notion of leaving like a lady, Mrs. Madrigal has seemingly found peace with her logical family in San Francisco: her devoted young caretaker Jake Greenleaf; her former tenant Brian Hawkins and his daughter Shawna; and Michael Tolliver and Mary Ann Singleton, who have known and loved Anna for nearly four decades.
Some members of Anna's family are bound for the otherworldly landscape of Burning Man, the art community in Nevada's Black Rock Desert where 60,000 revelers gather to construct a city designed to last only one week. Anna herself has another destination in mind: a lonely stretch of road outside of Winnemucca where the 16-year-old boy she once was ran away from the whorehouse he called home. With Brian and his beat-up RV, she journeys into the dusty troubled heart of her Depression childhood to unearth a lifetime of secrets and dreams and attend to unfinished business she has long avoided.
Inspiration for the Netflix Limited Series, Tales of the City
The eighth novel in the beloved Tales of the City series, Armistead Maupin's best-selling San Francisco saga.
Following the success of his New York Times bestseller Michael Tolliver Lives, Armistead Maupin's Mary Ann in Autumn is a touching portrait of friendship, family, and fresh starts, as the City by the Bay welcomes back Mary Ann Singleton, the beloved Tales of the City heroine who started it all. A new chapter begins in the lives of both Mary Ann and Michael Mouse Tolliver when she returns to San Francisco to rejoin her oldest friend after years in New York City... the reunion that fans of Maupin's beloved Tales of the City series have been awaiting for years.
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Now a Netflix series starring Elliot Page and Laura Linney . . .
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Now a Netflix series starring Elliot Page and Laura Linney . . .