new york city got into my blood. it’s a side effect of spending years walking its streets, talking to hundreds of residents. it invaded my thoughts, colonized my reading list, and still shows up, vividly, in my dreams.
my favorite new york books are about people. My latest, New Yorkers, contains interviews with nearly 80 residents, including Black Lives Matter protesters and an Occupy Wall Street veteran, as well as 9/11 first responders. when covid-19 broke out, i spent months talking to nurses and survivors. I am still in conversation with them; you never leave a new york project behind.
You are reading: Books on new york
many books have been written about new york systems. (If you like sewers, get lost in the works of Kate Ascher: Anatomy of a City.) They’re interesting but they don’t convey the New York I love: a city of voice and interruption, full of people ready to chatter away the days. Is a sewer line going to talk about the immigrant experience? probably not.
Building a book with the words of New Yorkers is painstaking work. Some turn to search engines to learn about the city, but the best New York books are from those that enter New York with awe and humility. a seeker is always more convincing than a know-it-all. if you commit to its streets, this place will surprise and shock you, but it will always toast.
1. Maeve Brennan’s The Long-Winded Lady No one captures New York’s little moments like Maeve Brennan. I remember a woman at City Diner, 90th and Broadway, who showed up most nights with a thick Russian novel and a glass of white wine. Maeve Brennan would have written her story in prose that would at first seem tenuous before revealing her weight. Brennan pulls off exactly this feat in the 47 short pieces here, all of which appeared in The New Yorker between 1954 and 1981. They are mild only on first reading.
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2. The Strange Woman and the City of Vivian GornickIn her memoir, Gornick describes New York as a “legendary setting for the creation myth of the young genius who arrives in the world capital…where he will eventually be recognized by the heroic figure he knows himself to be.” Unsurprisingly, these men are still here, often transplants, braying about their authentic New York experience. Gornick wants none of it: “It’s not my city at all.” new york is populated by “the eternal earthlings who roam these mean and wonderful streets in search of a self reflected in a stranger’s eye.”although gornick grew up in the bronx, she considers herself a pilgrim to the city when she finally moved a manhattan experienced what most of us yearn for when we arrived: “I could taste the world in my mouth, pure world.”
3. new york on the run by jeremiah mossmoss looks around in anger at the new york of today. she dictates the money. speculation destroys. pedestrians experience repetition. Haven’t I already passed this Bank of America? A New York from nowhere blooms, block by block. I am often frustrated, but it is Moss who wrote the cri de coeur. As the city changes, Moss warns, the people and their opportunities will change. The Angry City books are necessary, and like most New York projects, this one never ends. On March 13 of this year, Moss wrote a blog post about the closure of Eisenberg’s, a large sandwich shop, another casualty of the pandemic. the attached photo shows the latest moss tuna sandwich flanked by a bottle of hand sanitizer.
4. Harvey Wang’s New YorkIn his foreword to this 1990 collection of portraits, city chronicler Pete Hamill describes three New Yorks: the land of romantic fantasy, the somber cityscape, and a New York of ” work and resistance. In this book of black and white photographs, Wang focuses on the latter, what he calls “Holdout New York”. if they lasted in 1990, today they are almost extinct: typographers, photoengravers, knife sharpeners. A blacksmith looks at the camera from his workshop in Astoria. “Just look at the eyes,” Hamill writes, “The eyes and the hands…do not perform their lives; they live them.” wang’s slim collection reminds us that we are all, in a way, resilient in an ever-changing city.
5. ice cream for freaks by dejon dejon is on my list because of the way he sells his own books. I met him outside a subway entrance in the South Bronx, where he had set up a trestle table and was persuading passersby to buy his latest crime novel. “just take a look, just look at the cover, just buy a book, how are you? I like those shoes”. In New York, you’re always outside someone’s establishment. Dejon wasn’t exactly expecting the book industry to offer him an advance. his advice: find an empty stretch of sidewalk, convince people, use his voice, sell it.
6. nevermind by jana prikrylprikryl is a very different kind of metropolitan writer, a highly talented poet whose work makes the familiar contours of the city strange. when he interviews new yorkers, he often finds a tendency toward the illusory. someone will talk about a street but then admit that it is a dream. prikryl welcomes these transformations, “like the east river that pretends / to be a river when it is merely an appetite”. his poems also catalog the many points of warmth that flash between New Yorkers. “in this city, friendship / the main mode of preparation for disasters.”
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7. the company of strangers by gus powellwhile working downtown, photographer gus powell followed the lead of poet frank o’hara and spent his lunch hour making art. For Powell, the camera frame is where New Yorkers meet, just for a second, to create complex friezes of urban life. Look long enough and you’ll notice the connective substance between his figures, what Powell calls the Plasma of New York. For me, there is no better representation of the complex pedestrian choreography of its sidewalks.
8. close to knives by david wojnarowiczcruising, sex work, homelessness, drug abuse, the aids epidemic: all are themes delivered by an artist who writes at high speed, clutching memories of new york as his community disappears – “piece by In pieces the landscape is eroding and in its place I am building a monument made of feelings of love and hate, sadness and feelings of murder.” In this 1991 “Memoir of Disintegration,” Wojnarowicz’s prose cries out for attention. to these New Yorkers, their lovers and friends, and watch as you etch your presence into the city’s social history.
9. harlem is nowhere by sharifa rhodes-pitts rhodes-pitts describes how the history she learned from harlem was “a simplified version of events where a place is allowed to be one thing or another.” but harlem is not so binary. the rhodes-pitts project captures many of its angles. she struggles with the weight of history, as well as how to approach gentrification. She recognizes the heavy names attached to the streets (baldwin, garvey, web du bois) and then veers to the anonymous characters discovered in the local archives. definitely not a complete story. harlem defies understanding.
10. upstairs in the old hotel by joseph mitchell the list of actors in mitchell’s writing is impressive: exterminators, preachers, shellfish. But what is most important in this collection of reports is Mitchell’s belief in the power of aimless wandering and the relentless bounty of the streets. I heard it repeated over and over again. no matter what you like, new york will provide it. If, like Mitchell, you are interested in people, there is still a vernacular, there are still eloquent automythologists. there is still a voice from new york. it will still bend your ears.
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new york: a city and its people in our time is published by john murray. To order a copy, go to guardianbookshop.com.
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