by Constance Rosenblum (Editor)
What do Francine Prose, Suketu Mehta, and Edwidge Danticat have in common? Each suffers from an incurable love affair with the Big Apple, and each contributed to the canon of writing New York has inspired by way of the New York Times City Section, a part of the paper that once defined Sunday afternoon leisure for the denizens of the five boroughs. Former City Section editor Constance Rosenblum has again culled a diverse cast of voices that brought to vivid life our metropolis through those pages in this follow-up to the publication New York Stories (2005).
The fifty essays in More New York Stories unite the city's best-known writers to provide a window to the bustle and richness of city life. As with the previous collection, many of the contributors need no introduction, among them Kevin Baker, Laura Shaine Cunningham, Dorothy Gallagher, Colin Harrison, Frances Kiernan, Nathaniel Rich, Jonathan Rosen, Christopher Sorrentino, and Robert Sullivan; they are among the most eloquent observers of our urban life. Others are relative newcomers. But all are voices worth listening to, and the result is a comprehensive and entertaining picture of New York in all its many guises.
The section on Characters'' offers a bouquet of indelible profiles. The section on Places takes us on journeys to some of the city's quintessential locales. Rituals, Rhythms, and Ruminations seeks to capture the city's peculiar texture, and the section called Excavating the Past offers slices of the city's endlessly fascinating history.
Delightful for dipping into and a great companion for anyone planning a trip, this collection is both a heart-warming introduction to the human side of New York and a reminder to life-long New Yorkers of the reasons we call the city home.
Format: Paperback
Pages: 320
Publisher: New York University Press
Published: 20 Dec 2010
ISBN 10: 0814776558
ISBN 13: 9780814776551
Book Overview: Unites New York's best-known writers to provide a window to the bustle and richness of city life
Former section editor Rosenblum gathers 50 of the best pieces of the post-September 11 era by masters of the form including Edwidge Danticat and Francine Prose...this rich sampling delivers.
New York is the plural city par excellence, the place of many tales. This new collection, taken from the pages of the city paper, gives us a new luxuriance of New York stories, neither neatly splashy nor narrowly sociological, but instead with the spice and eccentricity and plural energy that New Yorkers will recognize as ours and non-New Yorkers may wish was theirs.
The City section was an invaluable counterpoint, almost a stowaway, on the cruise liner of the Sunday New York Times. It delivered news that stays news-indelible and intimate stories of city life, by turns disturbing, amusing, and enchanting. The pieces in this collection are as alive now as they were when they first saw newsprint. Reading them again, even across a distance of years, was like bumping into old friends.