New Moon: A Coming-of-Age Tale - Softcover

Grossinger, Richard

4

6 ratings by Goodreads

9781583949856: New Moon: A Coming-of-Age Tale

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1583949852 ISBN 13: 9781583949856

Publisher: North Atlantic Books, 2016

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New Moon: A Coming-of-Age Tale traces the author’s path through grade school at P. S. 6, “group” in Central Park, high school at Horace Mann, and college at Amherst, while recalling Freudian psychoanalysis, Grossinger’s Hotel in the Catskills, Color War at Camp Chipinaw, ‘50s rock ’n’ roll, teen romance, the mysterious world of tarot cards, discovery of Carl Jung, and spiritual and political initiation. This is not the paperback of the 1996 hardcover but its metamorphosis and realization.

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About the Author:

A native of New York City, Richard Grossinger attended Amherst College and the University of Michigan, receiving a BA in English (1966) and a PhD in anthropology (1975).

He wrote his doctoral thesis on his fieldwork with fishermen in Eastern Maine, after which he taught for two years at the University of Maine at Portland-Gorham and five years at Goddard College in Vermont.

With his wife, Lindy Hough, he is cofounding publisher of North Atlantic Books and its forerunner, the journal Io. His works include early books of experimental prose; a series of titles on holistic medicine, cosmology, and embryology; two memoirs; and recent books re-exploring these themes, related topics, and aspects of contemporary politics and pop culture.

After living in Berkeley, California, from 1976 for thirty-eight years, Grossinger and Hough moved back to Portland, Maine, in 2014. They have also lived part-time in Manset, Maine, since 2001. Their children are Robin Grossinger, a historical geographer at San Francisco Estuary Institute, and Miranda July, a writer, film director, and conceptual artist.

Review:

“A memoir of baseball, high school, and Jewish New York in the ’50s, New Moon is also a portrait of a defenseless consciousness uncovering itself and the world simultaneously. The spellbinding prose and terrifying intimacy of Richard Grossinger’s book makes an unforgettable reading experience.”
—Jonathan Lethem

“This is a strong, deeply moving book. I can’t think of another example in which the details and particularities of childhood have been evoked so fully, with such painstaking care and precision.”
—Paul Auster, author of Moon Palace, Mr. Vertigo, and Smoke

“Since the days when I depended on the magazine Io to expand and verify a lot of what I was beginning to learn of the deep dark universe, I have found Richard Grossinger’s empirical analysis of American Culture unerring. New Moon, a memoir of Grossinger’s early life, starts out in the Land of Giants and emerges onto 5th Avenue, the mainstreet of Metropolis. In its observational acuity it is great anthropology—as a tale of growing it is strangely charming and funny and scary.”
—Edward Dorn, author of Some Business Recently Transacted in the White World

“Using the haunted lives which inhabited the famous Katskills resort as a backdrop, Richard Grossinger writes a brilliant novel about a young man’s passage into adulthood. New Moon is a departure for the Jewish-American novel, as well—no longer obsessed with Old World issues, and not finding solace in the illusion of an American Promised Land.”
—Ishmael Reed, author of Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down

“In this remarkably courageous and unsparing self-examination, Richard Grossinger explores the labyrinths of panic and fear that lay beneath the Paradise-like surface of a privileged childhood. Part magic, part myth, part dream, part prayer, New Moon is a liquid mirror that leads straight to the depths of the unconscious.”
—Mary Mackey, author of The Year the Horses Came

“At once a memoir, an account of psychoanalysis, and a both savage and loving account of New York in the ’50s, New Moon is a work with many layers and a unique tone, reminiscent of Robert Musil’s A Man Without Qualities in its blend of analytical realism, melancholia, and acute psychoanalytic and philosophical penetration.”
—Andrew Harvey (author of The Divine Feminine: Exploring the Feminine Face of God Throughout the World)

“A strange and remarkable self-evaluation in the form of a novel—illuminating, tender, moving, evocative ... any number of adjectives of praise would be appropriate.”
—George Plimpton (author of Out of My League)

“A fascinating self-portrait of the youth of one of our most profound and rebellious thinkers, told with a deceptive simplicity that is capable of shifting at any moment into the haunted resonance of a fairy tale, and in a language so nakedly honest it is never more than one step away from tenderness.”
—Gerald Rosen (author of The Carmen Miranda Memorial Flagpole and Growing Up Bronx)

“Indeed, some readers are going to rank this memoir of baseball, summer camp, Latin classes, domestic terrors, and enchanted moments at Grossinger’s as a spiritual quest in the tradition of Blake, Emerson, and ... James Agee....”
—Mike Harris, Los Angeles Times

“Richard Grossinger tells me who he is, so he shows me who I am.”
—Joy Mann� (author of Soul Therapy)

“... skillfully evokes the world of ’50s New York and Grossinger’s Catskills as well as the counterculture of the ’60s....” —Publishers Weekly

“New Moon is something new under the sun, a real psychoanalytic autobiography.”
—Psychoanalytic Books: A Quarterly Journal of Reviews