In Village Dreams, Jay Quint revives and puts his own imaginative spin on the tradition of the flâneur. In a voice that deftly alternates between astringently critical and warmly evocative, he shares seemingly random observations and insights about urban life that ultimately add up to more than the sum of their parts.

Tapping into his fever dreams on three Saturdays in The Village, Jay Quint serves an engagingly personal, intellectually voracious, charmingly quirky treatise on loneliness and connection, camp and capitalism, hipsterism and memory, gayness and place.

Jay Quint has done something remarkable, something so original that it is difficult to describe. A serious aesthete with a passion for history and politics, he has undertaken a formally inventive literary experiment to explain gay sensibility in North America during the course of the twentieth century and beyond. Bringing together geographical places and cultural productions into a seemingly random but carefully organized series of reflections and ruminations, he strives to recover the tumultuous, rapidly fading social and intellectual events that once made us who we were—and, perhaps, still are.

This essay on the demise of counterculture offers a new perspective on the Gay Village, finding in these urban enclaves not a glimmer of utopia but a testimony to the failure of the revolutionary dreams of the sixties. Erudite, digressive, and misanthropic, Village Dreams is a bold contribution to the literature of the flaneur.

A lyrical, flaneur-style wander through the contradictions, hypocrisies, hopeful moments, failures and recurring revolutions of the left, Jay Quint’s new book provides a stimulating set of questions for those who dare to look both backwards and forwards on their way to a better world.

How did we get to this unenviable place we find ourselves in? A sunny stroll around the old gay neighborhood turns into a journey through varied cultural, sexual and political landscapes. Meditative, erudite, pugnacious, melancholy, provocative, Village Dreams is a book to think on, wrestle with, perhaps in the end to savor.

Shot through with literary flair and polemical force, Village Dreams is a compelling and timely meditation on living against the grain. Perambulating through scenes past and present, Jay Quint casts new light on hidden niches, political dead-ends, and the rich, vexed histories of hipness and homosexuality.