Essays, poetry and
impressions
Phillip Lopate (ed)
Writing
New York (Library of
America, US). A massive
literary anthology taking in
both fiction and non-fiction
writings on the city, and
with selections from
everyone from washington
Irving to Tom Wolfe.
Frederico Garcia Lorca
Poet in New York
(Penguin/Grove Weidenfeld,
o/p). The Andalucian poet
and dramatist spent nine
months in the city around
the time of the Wall Street
Crash. This collection of
over thirty poems reveals
his feelings on the
brutality, loneliness,
greed, corruption, racism
and mistreatment of the
poor.
Joseph Mitchell
Up in the Old Hotel
(Random House, US).
Mitchell's collected essays
(he calls them stories), all
of which appeared in the New
Yorker , are works of a
sober if manipulative
genius. Mitchell depicts
characters and situations
with a reporter's precision
and near-perfect style - he
is the definitive chronicler
of NYC street life.
Jan Morris
Manhattan '45
(Penguin/Oxford UP).
Morris's best piece of
writing on Manhattan,
reconstructing New York as
it greeted returning GIs in
1945. Effortlessly written,
fascinatingly anecdotal,
marvelously warm about the
city. See also The Great
Port (Oxford UP).
History, politics and
society
Herbert Asbury
The Gangs of New York
(Thunder's Mouth Press, US).
First published in 1928,
this fascinating account of
the seamier side of New York
is essential reading. Full
of historical detail,
anecdotes and character
sketches of crooks, the book
describes New York mischief
in all its incarnations and
locales.
Edwin G. Burrows and
Mike Wallace
Gotham: A History of New
York City to 1898
(Oxford UP). Enormous and
encyclopedic in its detail,
this is a serious history of
the development of New York,
with chapters on everything
from its role in the
Revolution to reform
movements to its racial
make-up in the 1820s.
Robert A. Caro
The Power Broker: Robert
Moses and the Fall of New
York (Random House, US).
Despite its imposing length,
this brilliant and searing
critique of New York City's
most powerful
twentieth-century figure is
one of the most important
books ever written about the
city and its environs.
Caro's book brings to light
the megalomania and
manipulation responsible for
the creation of the nation's
largest urban
infrastructure.
Kenneth T. Jackson
(ed) The Enyclopedia of
New York (Yale UP).
Massive, engrossing and
utterly comprehensive guide
to just about everything in
the city. Much dry detail,
but packed with incidental
wonders.
Luc Sante
Low Life: Lures and
Snares of Old New York
(Vintage, US). This
chronicle of the seamy side
between 1840 and 1919 is a
pioneering work. Full of
outrageous details usually
left out of conventional
history, it reconstructs the
day-to-day life of the urban
poor, criminals and
prostitutes with a shocking
clarity. Sante's prose is
poetic and nuanced, his
evocations of the seedier
neighborhoods, their dives
and pleasure-palaces, quite
vivid.
Art, architecture and
photography
H. Klotz (ed)
New
York Architecture 1970-1990
(Prestel/Rizzoli). Extremely
well-illustrated account of
the shift from modernism to
postmodernism and beyond.
Jacob Riis
How the Other Half Lives
(Dover/Hill & Wang).
Republished photojournalism
reporting on life in the
Lower East Side at the end
of the nineteenth century.
Its original publication
awakened many to the plight
of New York's poor.
Stern, Gilmartin,
Mellins; Stern, Gilmartin,
Massengale; Stern, Mellins,
Fishman New
York 1900; 1930; 1960
(Rizzoli, US). These three
exhaustive tomes, subtitled
"Metropolitan
Architecture and
Urbanism," contain all
you'd ever want or need to
know about architecture and
the organization of the
city. The facts are dazzling
and numbing, the photos
nostalgia-inducing.
N. White and E.
Willensky (eds) AIA
Guide to New York
(Macmillan/Harcourt Brace).
Perhaps even more than the
above, the definitive
contemporary guide to the
city's architecture, far
more interesting than it
sounds, and useful as an
on-site reference.
Gerard R. Wolfe
New York: A Guide to the
Metropolis (McGraw-Hill,
US). Set up as a walking
tour, this is a little more
academic - and less
opinionated - than others,
but it does include some
good stuff on the outer
boroughs. Also informed
historical background.
Fiction
Martin Amis
Money (Penguin/Viking
Penguin). Following the
wayward movements of
degenerate film director
John Self between London and
New York, a weirdly
scatological novel that's a
striking evocation of 1980s
excess.
James Baldwin
Another Country
(Penguin/ Vintage).
Baldwin's best-known novel,
tracking the feverish search
for meaningful relationships
among a group of 1960s New
York bohemians. The
so-called liberated era in
the city has never been more
vividly documented - nor its
knee-jerk racism.
Truman Capote
Breakfast at Tiffany's
(Penguin/Random House). Far
sadder and racier than the
movie, this novel is a
rhapsody to New York in the
early 1940s, tracking the
dissolute youthful residents
of an uptown apartment
building and their movements
about town.
Chester Himes
The Crazy Kill (Canongate
Pub Ltd). Himes wrote
violent, fast-moving and
funny thrillers set in
Harlem; this and Cotton
Goes to Harlem are among
the best.
Henry James
Washington Square
(Penguin/Viking Penguin).
Skillful and engrossing
examination of the mores and
strict social expectations
of New York genteel society
in the late nineteenth
century.
Joyce Johnson
Minor Characters
(Penguin). Women were never
a prominent feature of the
Beat generation; its
literature examined a male
world through strictly male
eyes. This book, written by
the woman who lived for a
short time with Jack Kerouac,
redresses the balance
superbly; there's no better
novel on the Beats in New
York.
Jay McInerney
Bright Lights, Big City
(Flamingo/Vintage). A
trendy, "voice of a
generation" book when
it came out in the 1980s, it
follows a struggling New
York writer in his job as a
fact-checker at an literary
magazine, and from one
cocaine-sozzled nightclub to
another. Amusing now, as it
vividly captures the times.
Henry Miller
Crazy Cock
(HarperCollins/Grove
Weidenfeld, o/p).
Semiautobiographical work of
love, sex and angst in
Greenwich Village in the
1920s. The more easily
available trilogy of Sexus,
Plexus and Nexus
(HarperCollins/Grove) and
the famous Tropics
duo ( ?of Cancer, ?of
Capricorn ) contain
generous slices of 1920s
Manhattan sandwiched between
the bohemian life in 1930s
Paris.
Dorothy Parker
Complete Stories
(Penguin). Parker's stories
are, at times, surprisingly
moving. She depicts New York
in all its glories, excesses
and pretensions with
perfect, searing wit.
"The Lovely Leave"
and "The Game,"
which focus, as many of the
stories do, on the lives of
women, are especially
worthwhile.
Damon Runyon
First to Last and On
Broadway (Penguin); also
Guys and Dolls (River
City). Collections of short
stories drawn from the
chatter of Lindy's Bar
on Broadway and since made
into the successful musical Guys
'n' Dolls .
J.D. Salinger
The Catcher in the Rye
(Penguin/Bantam). Salinger's
gripping novel of
adolescence, following
Holden Caulfield's sardonic
journey of discovery through
the streets of New York. A
classic.
Hubert Selby Jr.
Last Exit to Brooklyn
(Paladin/Grove Weidenfeld).
When first published in
Britain in 1966 this novel
was tried on charges of
obscenity and even now it's
a disturbing read, evoking
the sex, the immorality, the
drugs and the violence of
downtown Brooklyn in the
1960s with fearsome clarity.
An important book, but to
use the words of David
Shepherd at the obscenity
trial, you will not be
unscathed.
Betty Smith
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
(Pan/HarperCollins).
Something of a classic, and
rightly so, in which a
courageous Irish girl learns
about family, life and sex
against a vivid prewar
Brooklyn backdrop. Totally
absorbing.
Edith Wharton
Old New York (Virago/Scribners).
A collection of short novels
on the manners and mores of
New York in the
mid-nineteenth century,
written with Jamesian
clarity and precision.
Virago/Scribner also publish
her Hudson River
Bracketed and The
Mother's Recompense ,
both of which center around
the lives of women in
nineteenth-century New York.
