Reading, Signing with Literary Icon Armistead Maupin at Bookshop Santa Cruz

Thursday, January 29th at 7pm at Bookshop Santa Cruz

Help us bid farewell to the fabulous cast of characters of Tales of the City for the paperback release of The Days of Anna Madrigal.

The bestselling Tales of the City series, Maupin’s valentine to San Francisco, began in serialized installments in the SF Chronicle in the mid-70s. In the ninth installment, Anna Madrigal, the grande dame at the center of the story, is a frail 92-year-old.

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.

Armistead Maupin is the author of the nine-volume Tales of the City series, Maybe the Moon, and The Night Listener. Maupin was the 2012 recipient of the Lambda Literary Foundation’s Pioneer Award. He lives in Santa Fe with his husband, the photographer Christopher Turner.