The Age of Cities

the long version

Equal parts Bildungsroman and purported literary artifact, The Age of Cities is really about the age of innocence. A manuscript is discovered inside a hollowed-out home economics textbook from the 1950s: the story of a male librarian from a small town who comes to the big city at the height of the Cold War in 1959. At first he is giddy with the discovery of an urban paradise, allowing him to reinvent himself at the same time as the city is. But his accidental discovery of a gay subculture—culminating in a feverish, dream-like initiation—pushes him irrevocably towards crisis.Written in the dialect of the time and framed by contemporary "analysis," The Age of Cities is an imaginary artifact that is about the past and present all at once: a novel of ambiguous boundaries and invasive dichotomies. It is also about discovery, loss, and the ages-old "closet" where stories lie hidden from view. Shortlisted for the City of Vancouver Book Award.