Tales of the City

Inspiration for the Netflix Limited Series, Tales of the City A PBS Great American Read Top 100 Pick The first novel in the beloved Tales of the City series, Armistead Maupin's best-selling San Francisco saga. 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 nine 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.

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 final three of which are 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. The last three novels of Armistead Maupin's bestselling, critically-acclaimed Tales of the City are now available for the first time as an omnibus edition. The epic series, published between 1978 and 2014, spans the decade before the AIDS crisis through the era of marriage equality following an unforgettable set of characters, whose diverse sexual identities helped set the social stage for the ongoing sexual revolution. Goodbye Barbary Lane-comprised of Michael Tolliver Lives (2007), Mary Ann in Autumn (2010), and The Days of Anna Madrigal (2014)-brings closure to the lives and legacies of the characters through which generations have found connection to America's larger cultural struggles over the past four decades.

Inspiration for the Netflix Limited Series, Tales of the City 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.

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.

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 could only come from Armistead Maupin.

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.

"An enormously talented writer.... By writing about what's seemingly different, Armistead Maupin always manages to capture what's so hilariously, painfully true for all of us." -Amy Tan, author of The Bonesetter's Daughter "Maupin writes with warmth, acuity and tremendous wit.... Read him." -Publishers Weekly 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.

The Days of Anna Madrigal, the suspenseful, comic, and touching ninth novel in Armistead Maupin's bestselling "Tales of the City" series, 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.

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. 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.

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. 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, have 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.