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DESCRIPTION:Christodora\n\nfrom Grove Press\n\nIn this vivid and compelling novel, Tim 
 Murphy follows a diverse set of characters whose fates intertwine in an 
 iconic building in Manhattan's East Village, the Christodora. Moving 
 kaleidoscopically from the Tompkins Square Riots and the attempts by 
 activists to galvanize a true response to the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s, 
 to a future New York City of the 2020s where subzero winters are a thing of 
 the past, Christodora recounts the heartbreak wrought by AIDS, illustrates 
 the allure and destructive power of hard drugs, and brings to life the 
 ever-changing city itself.\n\nOn Avenue B in the heart of the Lower East 
 Side, the Christodora is home to Milly and Jared, a privileged young couple 
 with artistic ambitions. Their neighbor, Hector, a Puerto Rican gay man who 
 was at one point celebrated for his work as an AIDS activist but has now 
 become a lonely addict, becomes connected to Milly and Jared's lives in 
 ways none of them can anticipate. Meanwhile, Milly and Jared’s adopted 
 son, Mateo, grows to see the opportunity for both self-realization and 
 oblivion that New York offers. As the junkies and protestors of the 1980s 
 give way to the hipsters of the 2000s and they, in turn, to the wealthy 
 residents of the crowded, glass-towered city of the 2020s, enormous changes 
 rock the personal lives of Milly and Jared and the constellation of people 
 around them, even as ghosts of the past cast a shadow on their future.\n\nA 
 captivating portrait of how ambition, compulsion, and trauma form and 
 re-form the lives of us all, Christodora is a closely observed panoramic 
 novel that powerfully evokes the danger, chaos, and wonder of New York 
 City—and the strange and moving ways in which its dwellers’ lives can 
 intersect.\n\nTim Murphy has reported on HIV/AIDS for twenty years, for 
 such publications as Poz magazine, where he was an editor and staff writer, 
 Out, Advocate, and New York magazine, where his July 2014 cover story on 
 the new HIV-prevention pill regimen PrEP was nominated for a GLAAD Media 
 Award for Outstanding Magazine Article. He also covers LGBT issues, arts, 
 pop culture, travel, and fashion for publications including the New York 
 Times, Condé Nast Traveler, Details, and Yahoo! Style. He lives in 
 Brooklyn and the Hudson Valley.\n\nCritical praise for Christodora:\n\n"An 
 impassioned, big-hearted, and ultimately hopeful chronicle of a changing 
 New York that authoritatively evokes the despair and panic in the city at 
 the height of the plague."—Hanya Yanagihara\n\n"A moving portrait of New 
 York in the time of AIDS, Tim Murphy’s honest and insightful writing 
 gives Christodora a particular vibrancy that causes the characters to leap, 
 whole, into the reader’s imagination. This spectacular novel is an 
 important addition to literature that captures New York in all its glory 
 and despair."—Candace Bushnell\n\n“[A] vivid account of the AIDS crisis 
 and its aftermath . . . Murphy has written The Bonfire of the Vanities for 
 the age of AIDS, using the same reportorial skills as Tom Wolfe to 
 re-create the changing decades, complete with a pitch-perfect deployment of 
 period detail. Skipping back and forth in time over 40 years, and 
 projecting itself into the near future, the novel achieves a powerful 
 evocation of the plague years.”—Publishers Weekly\n\n“[A] perceptive 
 debut novel . . . Murphy vividly recaptures 1980s and ’90s New York, 
 dampening any pop-culture nostalgia with reminders of the crude 
 pharmacology and callous bureaucracy imposed upon those struggling with 
 AIDS . . . His multigenerational tale is a clever inversion of the usual 
 addiction-begets-AIDs narrative and a reminder that despite recent medical 
 advances, the disease still finds ways to ravage people’s lives . . . It 
 never wavers in its warmth toward its characters, or its insistence upon 
 the possibility of healing.”—Booklist (starred 
 review)\n\n“Christodora is the best novel I’ve read about the cost of 
 activism.”—Paul Yamazaki, City Lights, San Francisco\n\n“I can’t 
 remember a time when I fell in love with a novel and its characters as much 
 as I fell for Christodora by Tim Murphy . . . The secret to this great 
 novel is an all-abiding love that Murphy has for his characters and the 
 redemption that they more than earn. The last fifty pages are among the 
 most vibrant and touching finales I’ve ever read. It is simply beautiful. 
 I will be recommending this book with all my heart when it arrives in 
 stores.”—William Carl, bookseller at Wellesley Books\n\n“Murphy, who 
 has long reported on HIV/AIDS, LGBT issues, pop culture, travel, and the 
 arts for a wide range of publications, here travels through New York City 
 from the AIDS-scarred 1980s to the hipster-dominated 2000s to the 
 wealth-drenched 2020s, all by focusing on a single East Village 
 building.”—Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal\n\n“An exuberant, 
 ambitious, funny, gorgeously written epic, Tim Murphy’s Christodora not 
 only makes us privy to the most intimate secrets and dreams of a group of 
 unforgettable diverse characters, this brilliant tale also sweeps us up 
 into the spirit of our age, from the AIDS crisis to now and even into the 
 future, so that we can see and feel the devastating effects of time as it 
 changes us forever.”—James Hannaham, author of Delicious 
 Foods\n\n“Every once in a while a writer truly gets this town with its 
 buffet of hipsters, crazy characters, and endearing troublemakers. 
 Christodora is a bit of Tom Wolfe, a streamlined City on Fire, and, well, 
 something special and all its own. Tim Murphy—smart, perceptive, and 
 streetwise—is an author with a dazzling eye and ear who delivers a real 
 New York narrative with an absorbing story line and a gallery of characters 
 fit for a twenty-first-century Manhattan mural. It came, I sat, I read and 
 read. I emerged completely satisfied.”—George Hodgman, New York Times 
 bestselling author of Bettyville\n\n“Murphy dives into the story of one 
 of the East Village’s most storied buildings—and returns with a moving 
 novel, a love letter to the complicated families we make here in New York, 
 and to the city itself.”—Alexander Chee, author of The Queen of the 
 Night\n\n“An intimate portrait of a bohemian family, Christodora is also 
 a capacious historical novel that vividly recreates the lost world of 
 downtown Manhattan in the eighties—a nuanced portrait of an era in which 
 artists were unwitting agents of gentrification and the bright dawn of gay 
 liberation was brutally interrupted by the AIDS epidemic.”—Jay 
 McInerney \n https://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2016/09/06/18790905.php
SUMMARY:Tim Murphy: Christodora
LOCATION:City Lights Bookstore,\n261 Columbus Ave\nSan Francisco, CA
URL:https://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2016/09/06/18790905.php
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