Equal parts bildungsroman and purported literary artifact, The Age of Cities is -really about the age of innocence. A manuscript is discovered inside a hollowed-out home economics textbook: it is the story of a young man from a small town who comes to the big city at the height of the Cold War. His accidental discovery of a gay -subculture—culminating in a feverish, dreamlike initiation—pushes him irrevocably toward crisis. The Age of Cities is about discovery, loss, and the contemporary "closet" where stories lie hidden from view.