We have just started a series about reading lists to prepare for – or accompany – visits to American cities. Charlotte Jones kicked it off with New York by recommending The Great Gatsby, John Dos Passos’s Manhattan Transfer (“a ridiculously brilliant novel, full of sensory overload, filmic cuts in place and character, as dislocated and dark as it is full of the city and its lives” agreed reader michaelsylvain), Kathy Acker’s short story New York City in 1979, David Wojnarowicz’s Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration, Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy, Herman Melville’s short story Bartleby the Scrivener and, for a panorama of 20th-century New York, Don DeLillo’s Underworld.
Her blog is a great place to start your reading – and here is what you had to add to it: your recommendations for fiction and non-fiction, in list form, and with added quotes. Is your favourite New York book not on the list? Add it in the comment thread below.
1. Netherland by Joseph O’Neill (2008)
Reader batchy recommends this novel about “New York, cricket and much more”, set in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks. The story circles around Hans van den Broek, a Dutchman who finds refuge in cricket as he starts to play for the Staten Island Cricket Club. However, the New Yorker said about it: “consistently misread as a 9/11 novel, which stints what is most remarkable about it: that it is a postcolonial re-writing of The Great Gatsby.”
New York in quotes from the book:
People in New York are authorized by convention to snoop around and mentally measure and pass comment on any real estate they’re invited to step into.
New York interposed itself, once and for all, between me and all other places of origin.
We were trying, as I irrelevantly analyzed it, to avoid what might be termed a historic mistake. We were trying to understand, that is, whether we were in a preapocalyptic situation, like the European Jews in the thirties or the last citizens of Pompeii, or whether our situation was merely near-apocalyptic, like that of the Cold War inhabitants of New York, London, Washington.
2. The Catcher in the Rye, JD Salinger (1951)
Salinger’s classic novel about the comings and goings of teen Holden Caulfield was recommended by Widdershins, vaguespace and derekg49. From his sordid, awkward nights in the Edmont Hotel to his wanderings in the lake in Central Park, few novels have captured the free, lonely, grand spirit of Manhattan in the mid-20th century.
In quotes from the book:
I live in New York, and I was thinking about the lagoon in Central Park, down near Central Park South. I was wondering if it would be frozen over when I got home, and if it was, where did the ducks go? I was wondering where the ducks went when the lagoon got all icy and frozen over. I wondered if some guy came in a truck and took them away to a zoo or something. Or if they just flew away.
I hate living in New York and all. Taxicabs, and Madison avenue buses, with the drivers and all always yelling at you to get out at the rear door, and being introduced to phony guys that call the Lunts angels, and going up and down in elevators when you just want to go outside, and guys fitting your pants all the time at Brooks, and people always–
I started walking over toward Broadway, just for the hell of it, because I hadn’t been over there in years. Besides, I wanted to find a record store that was open on Sunday. There was this record I wanted to get for Phoebe, called “Little Shirley Beans.”
3. Inside the Dream Palace: The Life and Times of New York’s Legendary Chelsea Hotel by Sherrill Tippins (2013)
Sherrill Tippins explores the history of the eccentric, sometimes squalid hotel-come-legend that hosted writers, actors, artists, musicians - including Andy Warhol’s crew - and became an icon of American counterculture. Reader michaelsylvain said: “Some non-fiction that is wonderfully evocative of a certain side of New York over the last century or so. It’s a great read, full of the history and flavour of people who had a certain view of what New York could be – or inhabited a would-be oasis of imagination and change within the city. Also, if you walk past the place itself, The Doughnut Plant does the best doughnuts in the city. Fact.”
In quotes from the book:
It’s a sad irony of New York life that over time, the fabled buildings and institutions that first attract us to the city fade into invisibility.
To the north, the cubbyhole offices and upright pianos of Tin Pan Alley churned out popular tunes for the masses, while only a few blocks beyond that to the northwest, the brothels and gambling dens of the Tenderloin satisfied the desires of many New York Men.
4. Bright Lights, Big City by Jay McInerney (1984)
McInerney’s novel about a 24-year old fact-checker by day, cocaine-using party-goer by night is a portrait of the 1980s’ hedonistic yuppie culture and the life in a high-brow magazine where the protagonist dreamed of writing. Recommended by Yosserian, markobo, cerealcat and derekg49.
In quotes from the book:
How did you get here? It was your friend, Tad Allagash, who powered you in here. You started out on the Upper East Side with champagne and unlimited prospects, strictly observing the Allagash rule of perpetual motion: one drink per stop. Tad’s mission in life is to have more fun than anyone else in New York City, and this involves a lot of moving around, since there is always the likelihood that where you aren’t is more fun than where you are.
5. Ragtime by EL Doctorow (1975)
“A pretty bloody great New York novel” according to tommolf, EL Doctorow’s work of historical fiction portrays the New York of the 1900s (up until the entry of the US into the first world war in 1917). TommyTraddles said: “EL Doctorow is, for me, the master literary representative of New York City. Ragtime is probably his greatest achievement, but is by no means his only New York masterpiece: The Waterworks (a Poe-esque gothic thriller set in Boss Tweed’s corrupt mid 19th century New York), World’s Fair (a semi-autobiographical story of a young boy growing up in the New York suburbs of the 1930s) and Billy Bathgate (the 1930s again, but this time with gangsters) are all spectacular, all completely immersive and vivid portrayals of New York, and all books I can recommend safe in the knowledge that they’ll change your life.
In quotes from the book:
Because like all whores you value propriety. You are creature of capitalism, the ethics of which are so totally corrupt and hypocritical that your beauty is no more than the beauty of gold, which is to say false and cold and useless.
And though the newspapers called the shooting the Crime of the Century, Goldman knew it was only 1906 and there were ninety-four years to go.
6. Open City by Teju Cole (2012)
Teju Cole’s story of a Nigerian immigrant who arrives to New York to study psychiatry after breaking up with his girlfriend revolves around protagonist Julius’s inner thoughts as much as around the city’s haunting presence in his new life. RowenaC says Cole’s Open City “gives such a great sense of the city as a layered, evolving entity” and enjoyed its “amazing descriptions of migrating birds and their encounter with the Statue of Liberty.”
In quotes from the book:
Each neighborhood of the city appeared to be made of a different substance, each seemed to have a different air pressure, a different psychic weight: the bright lights and shuttered shops, the housing projects and luxury hotels, the fire escapes and city parks.
7. The Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe (1987)
Tom Wolfe’s drama about class, racism and politics is a brilliant social exploration of the New York of the 1980s. Possibly one of the best reads about the spirit and excesses of Wall Street in the midst of the neoliberalist boom, it is a “hell of a read, an uproariously funny tableau vivant of a dysfunctional city”, according to Pazuzu. It was also recommended by Widdershins, Steff Clarke and vaguespace.
In quotes from the book:
Like more than one Englishman in New York, he looked upon Americans as hopeless children whom Providence had perversely provided with this great swollen fat fowl of a continent. Any way one chose to relieve them of their riches, short of violence, was sporting, if not morally justifiable, since they would only squander it in some tasteless and useless fashion, in any event.
Bullshit reigns.
8. The Amazing Adventures of Cavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon (2000)
This Pulitzer-winning novel centres on the lives of two Jewish cousins during (and before, and after) the second world war. One is a Czech artist and the other a Brooklyn-born writer; both become prominent figures in the comic-book industry. It was recommended by vaguespace and sifrLXXXVI.
In quotes from the book:
There was something unmistakably exultant about the mess that Rosa had made. Her bedroom-studio was at once the canvas, journal, museum, and midden of her life. She did not “decorate” it; she infused it.
He recalled his and Tracy’s parting at Penn Station on the morning of Pearl Harbor, in the first-class compartment of the Broadway Limited, their show of ordinary mute male farewell, the handshake, the pat on the shoulder, carefully tailoring and modulating their behavior through there was no one at all watching, so finely attuned to the danger of what they might lose that they could not permit themselves to notice what they had.
9. Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann (2009)
McCann’s book combines the story of the famous tightrope walk between the Twin Towers by Philippe Petit in 1974, captured in the lauded film Man on Wire, with the fictional trial of a New York prostitute. PatCake and thechief81 endorsed it as one of the best New York books of recent years.
In quotes from the book:
She’s always thought that one of the beauties of New York is that you can be from anywhere and within moments of landing its yours.
You can close your eyes and there will be a light snow falling in New York, and seconds later you are sunning upon a rock in Zacapa, and seconds later still you are surfing through the Bronx on the strength of your own desire.
10. Up in the Old Hotel by Joseph Mitchell (1992)
As an extra read, TommyTraddles recommends the indispensable, lovely New Yorker magazine features by Joseph Mitchell, collected in Up in the Old Hotel. “They are definitely literature”, he says. “They’re simply the most wonderfully written, brilliantly observed portraits of the people and places of New York I have ever read.
In quotes from the book:
Gould is a night wanderer, and he has put down descriptions of dreadful things he has seen on dark New York streets – descriptions, for example, of the herds of big gray rats that come out in the hours before dawn in some neighborhoods of the lower East Side and Harlem and unconcernedly walk the sidewalks. “I sometimes believe that these rats are not rats at all,” he says, “but the damned and aching souls of tenement landlords.”
Is your favourite missing? Add it in the comment thread below. Next up: Boston.
