Books set in the city you live in.

I'm reading the Bluegrass Conspiracy right now. It takes place mostly in Lexington, and the historical aspect has been the most interesting. For example: I now know that the Gall's police outfitting company over near my father's house once funneled guns to Colomiban drug lords. The club over by campus was once a Mos Eisley scale den of crooked cops, drug dealers and prostitutes.

The history aspect has been fascinating, as well as knowing exactly where all the horse farms are. Plus, many of the crooked politicians and old-money horse farmers have descendents that are in public office today.

because I live in LA, it's a bit of a free for all. Some beautiful literature has been written about this city, as well as all the usual "starlette trash" works. my cityscape is as fictional as it is real.

The library is flooded with NYC books, obviously. But Sara Gran's debut novel, Saturn's Return to New York, has some parts that are set in my somewhat obscure Brooklyn neighborhood (Greenwood Heights, right below Park Slope) and they mention a nearby historic grocery store and several specifics about the cemetary that gives the area its name. I picked up the book by accident, and found the characters walking on my very own street. Very cool.

Also, if anyone is into NYC history, you shold read Forever by Pete Hamill.

A friend was just reading a novel set in Madison, WI. Something about a woman who was about to break up with her boyfriend/husband when he dove off a pier and became paralyzed, I can't remember the title.

I think there was a Neil Gaiman story set here, and American Gods has lots of Wisconsin stuff in the House on the Rock chapter (to the point that my girlfriend and I actually drove there using directions from the book). There must be more though.

There's this book set in my town about this guy who wanders around all day and some bloke shags his wife. It's quite well regarded, but I've never read it myself.

Ah yeah Joycey and Dublin. The curious thing with that is while I recognise Street names, pubs and areas in Dubliners, Portrait of the Artist and Ulysses, I find that all have changed so much in the century since that they might as well be in another City entirely. "Nighttown" for example....
Conversely, I now live in London and after years of reading books set here and missing countless references to class etc due to an ignorance of the Citys geography, now whenever I read a London novel I spend much of the time obsessing over such details.....I'm a London geek...

I can't think of anything, other than a very small portion of Snow Mountain Passage, that's set in San Jose. San Francisco (and Salinas, thanks to Steinbeck) gets everything around here.

New Orleans' local-products obsession extends to books--talking to people around here you'd think Confederacy of Dunces is the greatest book ever instead of just pretty good. Also apparently Walker Percy is Jesus and Superman and Faulkner all rolled into one (this mystifies me--The Moviegoer is mildly entertaining but nothing else of his ever grabbed me).

There's really not a lot to say about NOLA's goth fiction industry--Poppy Z Brite writes travel features for the local paper and Anne Rice's house is purple and huge.

Personally I'm so sick of Nelson Algren I'd like to vomit, but then again I'm sick of Chicago, period. It is interesting to see how scummy the now-yuppified places like Wicker Park used to be, but I consider Algren such a bullshitter by this point that I wonder how well it corresponded to reality. Shit, I can't remember the name of the Simone de Beauvoir novel I read a couple of years ago that seemed to have a bit of him in it, but it sure confirmed my suspicion that his words were a bit uh unreliable... I do like A.D. Nauman's science-fictional future projection of Chicago though!

Five Finger Discount

Ah ha! A Man in Full by Thomas Wolfe is set in my home town, Atlanta.

Val

Nobody Walks in LA is the most realistic LA story written yet. It's fiction, but set in the real place of LA. It talk about local freeways and eateries (like the World Famous Tommy's) and dispels the myths often conceived about Los Angeles and Hollywood. This is a great work to understand LA from a local with real experiences that are not hollywood dreams or tripped-out adventures.

No one has written anything yet about where I live, so I started this morning:

“I Sit And Listen To Gillian Welch As The Sun Rises” was going to be the tile of a poem I had stringing through my mind, until I realized I was actually sitting on my couch listening to bluegrass as the sun was poking through the blinds. It took me a while longer to remember I’m not a poet, but by then it didn’t matter. The song had already worked its way through me, and I was watching the sunlight catch and grow through the room. And it was simply following the music which had been spreading from corner to corner of the house since I had wrapped up my work an hour or two earlier, a disastrously productive late night. But sometimes my work, like the songs we listen to, are lonesome and require silence to complete. I forget who described the early Kentucky wailers as carrying that “high, lonesome sound,” but they knew what I’m describing here. It happens every morning, though we let it go. It’s even too early for the birds; just a low, soft light across the fields framing the dark silhouetted trees in the neighborhood like veins, a shadowed aortal flow. There are no mountains here, but the same silences exist. All the earth shares in the vacancy of first light. I wish what I had to say was from poetry. I wish I had time to fold, spindle, mutilate words to match what I’d like to say all day. Even greater, I wish I knew what to say. But then, what I listened to this morning was evidence that people do. Perhaps a few others. And as Saturday morning occurs here across Ohio I sit and watch Gillian Welch and Emmylou Harris sing a tune older than the couch I’m sitting in, older than Scout or myself and half the people in this neighborhood, and I’m drawn into thinking about how old things really are, and how long it takes people to really write what should be said about the oldest things. And don’t you know, darn it, but the birds started their first songs as I wrote this? The light pours through my windows now, all of them golden and alarming. I should go to bed. And I’m glad I got my work done, for one, but I’m even happier that I was able to be here and witness this dawn, which we so rarely see, full of music. And I’m glad for this old couch. And my dusty drapes. And I’m glad some old coot grabbed his gitbox one day in the backwoods smokey hills of Tenneseee years ago and slung his voice skyward. He too, like these dawnbirds, simply had something to say and voiced it low, high, and then quite seriously, into song.

My grandmother just sent me a book set in my hometown of Evansville, Indiana entitled "Invitation to Valhalla". Haven't cracked it open yet....appears to be some sort of lovestory set in WWII. I currently reside in Lakeland, Florida...I seriously doubt one would stoop to wasting literary talent by writing about this overdeveloped swampland. All the decent Floridian writers seem to concentrate their efforts on South Florida: Carl Hiaasen, Dave Barry, etc.

The New York Trilogy. . . hot.

... Hmmm... Well, Bill Bryson lives right across the river from me. He mentions local things/places is his book that I recognize/frequent. So that must count. His books give a nice slice of what life is like up here.

I'm getting a little weirded out at the moment by a collection of Michael Marshall Smith short stories - he evidently lives in North London (as do I) and frequently refers to places I pass on the bus every day. Including the uber-dodgy Archway Tavern, eep.

But there are loads of books cashing in on London geography and mythology innit.

I was in the Prospect of Whitby in Wapping yesterday. In yesteryear it was frequented by Dickens, Pepys and de Quincey.

Perhaps this thread should be renamed, Books set in the pub you live in.

There's the mighty Brighton Rock of course, but also a surprising number of reeeallly rubbish books. I think the most absurd was a novel about some slackers who hide some accidentally stolen cocaine in the Fishing Museum and then go into a downward spiral of being twats. It had an endorsement from Julie Burchill on the cover...

Hell on Hoe Street. Probably the best (and only) Walthamstow gangster novel.

There was a Charles Baxter story set on the block I used to live on in Minneapolis (though it failed to mention Liquor Lyle's).

The phone book.

The Wimbledon Poisoner (and sequels) by Nigel Williams features all the places I grew up in. I love that book, smug and middle class though it is.

Two more New York books to mention:

Mark Helprin's "A Winter's Tale," which, daft as it is, convinced me at 15 that I had to live in New York someday. The book has some dubious poetic pretensions, but some of the sections (the battle between the two newspapers, the winter carnival) are pretty marvelous.

And Jonathan Lethem's "Motherless Brooklyn" has several scenes (including the opening) set smack dab in my neighborhood. His description of the Papaya King at 86th & Lex. is dead on.