The other day, when I was listening to a podcast that shall remain nameless, I heard someone ask for recommendations for what her college-age daughter should read when she moved to New York City. It's thought-provoking question to a person who loves to be where they live in every way. Reading books, regardless of topic, about a place you're moving to, or just visiting for the first time gives you a perspective on the place that's different from what you'd get from tourist guides. It can surround you in the atmosphere of that place before you get there, creating an imaginary landscape that you can be more thrilled about seeing "for real"when you finally set foot there. Reading older books about what happened where you are before it became the place you see before you, makes you conscious of how history changes the geography of our everyday lives. And, if you're going to read anyway while you're visiting somewhere, why read about some other place?
Sit on that damn subway reading about other people doing the exact same thing, walking the same streets.
The first couple of trips I made back to my old NYC stomping grounds after having left, did include reading books set there: First, I read Teju Cole's meditative masterpiece, Open City, set up and down the upper-West Side, and then the following year, made my way through Kimberly McCreight's adolescent thriller, Reconstructing Amelia. McCreight's book was pretty bad, but said interesting things about rich teens in Park Slope. Since I used to live near Park Slope, I saw those white uniformed kids as they got out of school, crowded onto the subway, and poured into Connecticut Muffin in packs. I have no idea if anything that McCreight says about them is accurate.
Before the internet, I remember that what I used to do when I moved to a new town was to scour the alternative weeklies and local newspapers to get a feel for what was going on. I still remember an afternoon I spent at the Egg & I in Minneapolis reading about the murder of a local politician and dangers of cruising in Loring Park the Twin Cities Reader and the City Pages. I was too busy being a graduate student in Minneapolis to read many novels after that, but soon after moving to Atlanta, I spent several hours listening to an audio recording of Nathan McCall's Them, about the gentrification of the Old Fourth Ward, and then later to an actually cringe-inducing audio-recording of BMF: The Rise and Fall of Big Meech and the Black Mafia Family. I have yet to read Pearl Cleage, but she is obligatory for Atlians. That other famous book written about this place is not worth re-reading.
Without further ado, here's a reading list for visitors and newcomers to my favorite of all cities, organized by borough.
Manhattan:
Lynne Tillman, No Lease on Life. On the Lower East Side in the era of heroin and crusty-punks, this is a novel that takes place in a 24 hour period, focusing on one woman's concerns, and is filled with jokes. This book vividly captures the energy of the LES just before it was taken over by yuppies and NYU-student partiers.
Anything by Joseph Mitchell, but Up in the Old Hotel collects most of the work that Mitchell wrote about New York for the New Yorker magazine. He was famous for his lyrical portraits of the odd characters of the Bowery. After that, try Benjamin Kunkel's new biography of Mitchell, which reveals some disturbing facts about the creation of some of these memorable characters, like maybe he kind of made them up.
Piri Thomas, Down These Mean Streets tells a beautiful, angry story of growing up in Spanish Harlem in the 1950s-1960s, when Malcolm X was still speaking on street-corners.
Anything by Edith Wharton. In contrast to the books above, Wharton writes about the city's Knickerbocker elite. It's the world of intrigue and reputation-maintenance as established in parties and late-night card games. An easy start would be her New York Stories, now in a collection from the New York Review of Books Classics collection, but the Age of Innocence and the House of Mirth are her most famous novels. Both are set in New York, and both will break your heart.
Robin D.G. Kelley, Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original. If you're interested in the history of Black New York City or of music, this biography captures both through the prism of one man's life, as music moved up and down the island, from Harlem to downtown Jazz clubs.
Ralph Ellision, The Invisible Man. This Great American novel includes some of the best description of New York's streets that you'll ever read. It's great for other reasons too. Take it on the subway, or read it on a park bench, and someone might even talk to you about how much they loved it and what they were doing the first time they read it.
Brooklyn:
Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn Before Spoonbill and Sugartown, Williamsburg was a land of immigrants. Before the quick-to-market YA plucky girl story, there was literature with young protagonists. This is a novel about a young bookish girl growing up in a German immigrant family at the turn of the century. It was the first book I read when I moved to Brooklyn, and as I was riding the train from Park Slope to Brighton Beach over the elevated section of the train at dawn before teaching a 7:00 am remedial writing class to the contemporary generation of NY immigrants, I found this book still relevant and alive.
Paule Marshall, Brown Girl, Brownstones, another classic tale of a young girl growing up in an immigrant family in Brooklyn, this time Caribbean, and in the 1940s. You can get this book with great introductions and afterwards by Mary Helen Washington and Edgwidge Danticat.
Jonathan Lethem, Motherless Brooklyn. Lethem has written many books about his love for this borough, but this one is the first, set largely around the Gowanus Canal, pre-gentrification it's the story of a detective with Tourette's syndrome, a Buddhist temple, and a memorable group of sinister Japanese businessmen.
Mandy Keifetz, Flea Circus, might seem to have a light-hearted title, but the fleas in this book are real and not amusing; this is one of the darkest books you'll ever read. An experimental novel where each chapter uses one letter of the alphabet, and it features Sunny's bar in Red Hook.
Queens
With the exception of Maus, I have not read a single book set in Queens. However, based on what others say about them, and the fact that Native Speaker has been sitting on my bookshelf as "to-read" since it first came out, and because I love Sam Lipsyte, my next NY trip will feature one of the newer books below:
Art Spiegelman, Maus This is a graphic novel about the Holocaust, as told to Speigelman by his father from his apartment in Rego Park, and interlaced with the younger Speigelman's memories of his childhood and young-adulthood. Despite its travels to Europe, it's a very New York comic in many ways, reflecting on the history of the comic underground in sections about Spiegelman himself.
Chang Rae Lee, Native Speaker about Korean-Americans in Flushing, a spy story and now considered a modern classic.
Sam Lipsyte, The Ask. Sam Lipsyte is one of the funniest, and also darkest writers I've ever read, and for that reason, this book has been on my to-read list for a while. If you liked Confederacy of Dunces, you will probably like Sam Lipsyte.
Matt Burgess, Dogfight: A Love Story and Uncle Janice, both novels about working class families and /or cops in Queens. Based on the reviews alone, these sound a lot similar to Richard Price's books, about which, see below.
The Bronx
Again, I must recommend Hip-Hop Family Tree, just a brilliant re-telling of the story of hip hop's birth in the Bronx.
Richard Price, The Wanderers is his first novel. It's not as good as his later novels (Clockers, set in New Jersey), or what he's done for television and film, but it is about the Bronx.
Adrian Nicole LeBlanc, Random Family: Love, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bronx; this is a journalist's account of two young women, their boyfriends, and their families. It has its problematic and voyeuristic moments, but it is an unforgettable story about race, sex and class
Staten Island
Just as the linked New York Times article suggests, all I could think of about Staten Island was cops and mobsters. However, there is a new literary novel by a guy named Eddie Joyce. It's called Small Mercies.
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