STAFF PICK - Little Boy Release Party

(From March 2019) City Lights celebrates the release of Lawrence Ferlinghetti's new novel, Little Boy, published by Doubleday Books with special guests reading passages from the book including: Andrew Sean Greer, Armistead Maupin, Michael Krasny, Maxine Hong Kingston, Shobha Rao, and Julien Poirier. A pre-recorded remark by Lawrence plays at the conclusion. This event was part of our Ferlinghetti 100th birthday celebrations in Spring 2019. In this unapologetically unclassifiable work Lawrence Ferlinghetti lets loose an exhilarating rush of language to craft what might be termed a closing statement about his highly significant and productive 99 years on this planet. The "Little Boy" of the title is Ferlinghetti himself as a child, shuffled from his overburdened mother to his French aunt to foster childhood with a rich Bronxville family. Service in World War Two (including the D-Day landing), graduate work, and a scholar gypsy's vagabond life in Paris followed. These biographical reminiscences are interweaved with Allen Ginsberg-esque high energy bursts of raw emotion, rumination, reflection, reminiscence and prognostication on what we may face as a species on Planet Earth in the future. Little Boy is a magical font of literary lore with allusions galore, a final repository of hard-earned and durable wisdom, a compositional high wire act without a net (or all that much punctuation) and just a gas and an inspiration to read.