Lawrence Ferlinghetti (100 years old on March 24) with new novel: Little Boy

Lawrence Ferlinghetti, poet and founder of City Lights Books (San Francisco), author of A Coney Island of the Mind and Pictures of the Gone World, among numerous other books, has been drawing from life since his student days in Paris where he frequented the Academie Julien and where he did his first oil painting.

Little Boy
A Novel
Lawrence Ferlinghetti

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.

“Publisher-poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s next book, due out less than a week before his 100th birthday, has been dubbed a ‘closing statement’ on an almost impossibly fecund life, and an energetic take on what the near future might hold in store for the rest of us… He was and continues to be a reticent cultural gatekeeper, an unassuming curator.”—Lit Hub, “Most Anticipated Books of 2019”

Title Little Boy
Subtitle A Novel
Author Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Publisher Doubleday
Format Hardcover
ISBN-10 0385544782
ISBN-13 9780385544788
Publication Date 19 March 2019
192 pages
$24.00

LAWRENCE FERLINGHETTI was born in Yonkers, New York in 1919. Founder of the famed City Lights Booksellers and Publishers, he is an activist, painter, and author of numerous works of poetry, prose, and drama. His A Coney Island of the Mind is one of the bestselling poetry books of all time. Among his many honors are the Los Angeles Times‘ Robert Kirsch Award, the NBCC’s Ivan Sandrof Award, and the ACLU’s Earl Warren Civil Liberties Award. He is also a Commander of the French Order of Arts and Letters. He lives in San Francisco, close by to the bookstore he founded.

# new books
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Little Boy. A Novel
Lawrence Ferlinghetti 100 years
on March 24, 2019
more on:  #Ferlinghetti100

• fleursdumal.nl magazine

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