PRIZES to win! PROMOTIONS
Armistead Maupin was born in Washington, D.C. in 1944 but was brought up in Raleigh, North Carolina. A graduate of the University of North Carolina, he served as a naval officer in Vietnam before moving to California in 1971 as a reporter for the Associated Press. In 1976 he launched his daily newspaper serial, Tales of the City, in the San Francisco Chronicle. The first fiction to appear in an American daily for decades, Tales grew into an international sensation when compiled and rewritten as novels. Maupin's six-volume Tales of the City sequence - Tales of the City, More Tales of the City, Further Tales of the City, Babycakes, Significant Others, and Sure of You - are now multi-million bestsellers published in eleven languages. The first three of these novels were adapted into widely acclaimed television mini-series. Maupin's 1992 novel, Maybe the Moon, chronicling the adventures of the world's shortest woman, was a number one bestseller. His novel The Night Listener was made into a feature film starring Robin Williams and Toni Collette in 2006. Armistead Maupin lives in San Francisco, California. For more information about Armistead Maupin and his work, please visit his official author website at: www.armisteadmaupin.com
If you missed last year's The Serial and worry about it, here's another long-running serialized newspaper soap peopled with the intertwined archetypes of the San Francisco ethos: Do anything, do it often, and make sure it's a cliche before making a firm commitment to it. This is satire at its second-best, the author having caught the nuances of stereotypical mod America, down to Vitabath, mescaline, phrases like cosmic plasticity, and outworn hippiedom. The characters - all too real in their unrelenting banality - are woven into a plot that centers around Anna Madrigal's apartment house at 28 Barbary Lane. Her tenants include Mary Ann Singleton, who has a brief affair with Beauchamp Days. His wife, DeDe (nee Halcyon), is made pregnant by a Japanese delivery boy and so goes to gay gynecologist Jon Fielding, who is sleeping with her husband Beauchamp and has had an affair with Michael Mouse Tolliver, who lives with his friend Mona, at Mrs. Madrigal's. Which is a neat package, when you consider that Mrs. Madrigal is having an affair with Edgar Halcyon, who is Beauchamp's father-in-law and Mary Ann's boss. Add to that a one-eared crisis center volunteer named Vincent and Mona's lesbian lover D'Orothea Williams - a black model who was white but took Black Like Me pills so she could get jobs. It's bad enough to have to live in a world full of joggers, poetry-spouting dope-smokers, disappointed matrons, and advertising executives. It virtually hurts to read about them; but, for faddish masochists - absolutely comic. (Kirkus Reviews)
