Secret Frequencies: A New York Education

In this compelling memoir, John Skoyles guides us through 1960s New York. Caught between his uncle Fred, a mob associate and man-about-town, and his aunt Linda, a secretary at Paramount Pictures on Times Square, the sixteen-year-old finds himself exploring everything from the bars and swank apartments of Manhattan’s Upper East Side to the flophouses and haunts of Forty-second Street. Secret Frequencies spins in graceful turns from deadpan hilarity to unflinching bleakness as Skoyles encounters New York’s most comic, absurd, and sometimes dangerous seductions.

John Skoyles is the author of a collection of essays and four books of poems, including Definition of the Soul and The Situation. He teaches at Emerson College in Boston.