Book signing set for new Hannah memoir at Darren Winston

SHARON — Darren Winston, Bookseller, a vintage bookstore and gallery in northwest Connecticut, will host a book signing on for painter Duncan Hannah’s new book, “Twentieth-Century Boy: Notebooks of the Seventies,” from 6 to 8 p.m. March 31.

The book is a rollicking and vivid account of his life in 1970s New York — a lost (and increasingly mystical) world of freedom, squalor and artistic achievement.

He arrived in New York City from Minneapolis as an art student hungry for experience, game for almost anything, and with a prodigious taste for drugs, girls, alcohol, movies, rock and roll, books, parties, and everything else the city had to offer. Throughout the decade he kept lively journals chronicling his experiences, which jump off the page with an expressive immediacy.

A louche, sometimes lurid, and incredibly entertaining report, his notebooks are full of outrageously bad behavior, naked ambition, gender-bending celebrities, fantastically good music and evaporating barriers of taste and decorum.

Along the way, Hannah crosses paths with Patti Smith, David Bowie, Lou Reed, Iggy Pop, Andy Warhol and dozens of other night clubbers of lesser fame.

But at the book’s center is a young man in the mix and on the make, determined to forge an identity for himself as an artist while being at risk from his own heedless appetites.

Hannah was born in Minneapolis in 1952, and attended Bard College and Parsons School of Design. He showed several of his figurative portraits in the Times Square Show in 1980, and his work is in numerous public and private collections, including the Metropolitan Museum and the Minneapolis Art Institute.