Review by Kevin Brannon
February 19, 2015
In his new memoir, Nights at Rizzoli, Felice Picano resists the temptation to think of late night Manhattan as an “elite city.” However, it is an apt phrase for the world he inhabited in the early and mid-’70s, when he worked nights at the old Rizzoli Bookstore, just south of the Plaza Hotel on Fifth Avenue. These were years in which a night on the job might involve a brush with haughty Mick Jagger or a sweetly unassuming Jackie Onassis, Greta Garbo or Salvador Dalí. Years that left him free to roam the city after hours, to explore the gay bars and the back rooms of the West Village, the dilapidated piers along the Hudson where gay men gathered for sex all night long. Nights at Rizzoli is a brief, sketchbook record of Picano’s encounters in both realms of a New York City that feels far more glamorous, dangerous and free, and somehow more fraught with history, than the one we know today.
See more at: Lambda Literary