New York 101

So after 25 years in London I'm moving to New York and I wanted a fitting reading list. What kinds of things?

Novels set in the city, especially ones where the city feels like one of the characters. (Who is the Dickens of NY? Runyon? Selby?)
A decent history - is there an equivalent of Ackroyd's 'biography of the city' for New York?
Biographies, especially artists and musicians.
Noir stuff, or is that a peculiarly LA thing?
And ... erm... anything I've missed.

Sorry to be so broad, and so vague, but any suggestions gratefully received...

http://media.ebaumsworld.com/mediaFiles/picture/760998/80718564.jpg

Start with this:

http://www.gothamgazette.com/books/images/powerBroker.jpg

Fortress of Solitude by Jonathan Lethem

The story of two kids growing up and making mistakes in Brooklyn in the 70s and 80s. Great writing, for the most part(!), and a really rich set of themes - comics, race, kiddie violence, gentrification, domesticity, graffiti. And tons of music. I'm not and never have been a New Yorker so I won't attempt any others, but that one just seems absolutely steeped in the place.

Great idea for a thread though. I toyed with doing something similar for LA a few months ago but never got round to it - I'll leave it for a bit, see how this one pans out.

I've got the Caro one taking up a couple of inches of shelf beside me right now - it's incredibly daunting, I can barely imagine ever opening it.

Give it a shot! It's difficult to put down once you've started.

'Up at the Old Hotel' - Joseph Mitchell

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_UYRnBtqBQJk/SifiCEiR4QI/AAAAAAAAAYM/UVkPeVK3BqU/s400/Low+Life.jpg

I won't attempt any others

I really enjoyedThe Island At The Center Of The World by Russell Shorto - a history of the Dutch colony prior to the English takeover. It reads kind of like a pop history of the period, but that's more down to a deft balancing of personal and political narratives, rather than any lack of rigour - it's been well-researched and gave me at least a fresh perspective on the place.

I read Bonfire of the Vanities because it was recommended as a perfect encapsulation of 80s New York, but I wouldn't bother - tbh I think American Psycho does a much better job.

Has anybody read Gotham: A History Of New York to 1898? It looks pretty amazing. A sequel is in the works too!

I was temporarily in possession of Gotham but made no inroads and used it mostly as a doorstop until my dad asked for it back.

Fortress of Solitude by Jonathan Lethem

^^^^^

Couldn't get through Fortress and I was LIVING on Dean St at the time. Still didn't do it for me.

How about the collected stories of Damon Runyon? And I'll second the Luc Sante, that's canonical.

I thought I'd read Fortress of Solitude so never picked it up; turns out it was Motherless Brooklyn I'd read (and enjoyed) so FoS goes to the top of the list. The Sante, from a brief scan on Amazon, looks perfect too...

Now Motherless Brooklyn, I actually like! Or, well, liked, I can't remember the details now.

Have one of these and these.

Biographies, especially artists and musicians.

This and this should hold you on the first score.

Noir stuff, or is that a peculiarly LA thing?

"LA"? Is that a place? This is NYFC.

Here you go.

And ... erm... anything I've missed.

Just move here and you won't miss anything, except money and floor space.

For the cynic in you:

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/P/0451526201.01._SCLZZZZZZZ_.jpg

And for the weirder bits of NY history:

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/P/1582340986.01._SCLZZZZZZZ_.jpg

and

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/P/158234311X.01._SCLZZZZZZZ_.jpg

http://www.forgotten-ny.com/

exists in book form but the website is better

My role models!

http://www.forgotten-ny.com/

exists in book form but the website is better

^^^

There was a Forgotten Florida site for a while, but it never really got off of the ground.

The New York Trilogy by Paul Auster? I guess that's not really about NYC so much.

I really liked "Kafka was the Rage" by Anatole Broyard (at least I did 10-12 years ago). It's a memoir of Beat-era downtown bohemianism.

I've been meaning to read this one for a while:

Gangsters and Gold Diggers: Old New York, the Jazz Age, and the Birth of Broadway

http://img1.fantasticfiction.co.uk/images/x1/x6175.jpg

I've read 2 Charyn non-fiction books and loved them both (his fiction stuff does not pique my interest at all though).

Samuel Delany's memoir, The Motion of Light in Water, is a wonderful portrait of the East Village from 58-65 or so.

Almost done with this:
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/art/blog/images/lethem_davis.jpg

Maybe not ESSENTIAL, but a decent read with some good dry humor and gives a sense of the beginnings of the return of the (mostly) white, privileged classes to Brooklyn. Also makes a good companion to Fortress, especially since Lethem wrote the introduction and grew up as Davis's neighbor.

Thirding Low Life and the Damon Runyon collection.

Just finished reading this and I'd seek it out

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51PBiUcsK5L._SL500_AA300_.jpg

Mark Helprin: Winter's Tale (it's Fairy Tale-y but nice)

I got this massive book called 'Writing New York' at the library once, it's edited by Philip Lopate and contains a lot of short fiction and historical memoirs of New York, from way way back. It was awesome but I don't think I even read half.

surprisingly no one mentioned Dellilo's Underworld yet.

so i will

That's funny, I don't think of it as a New York book at all - even though there are, what, at least three crucial sections set there. Same for Libra - just one chapter iirc but it's really evocative.

I have good history of Times Square somewhere in my storage space -- maybe it was The Devil's Playground but I'm not sure that was the title and can't exactly remember. Good idea to learn something about this total tourist trap though, because it's easy to write it off otherwise.

just listen to the jay-z song

http://i493.photobucket.com/albums/rr296/OCD_NYC/OCD/EB-WHITE.jpg

One of the few Delanys I haven't read, this looks pretty interesting --

http://img1.fantasticfiction.co.uk/images/x0/x40.jpg

it is with great regret that i link to kottke, but the except from the e.b. white book he posted is the only place i can find any text

http://kottke.org/08/10/here-is-new-york

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/c/cc/ManhattanTransfer.jpg

Fantastic - there's a good half-dozen of these that are straight on my list. And, as I really don't want to have to carry them over with me, any NY bookshop recommendations? The kind of place where a) they might stock a good percentage of these titles, and b) they don't mind being asked for recommendations.

The Strand
St Mark's Books

http://www.strandbooks.com/
http://www.stmarksbookshop.com/

I think this is the place where I bought Motherless Brooklyn and Barthes' Critical Essays:
http://www.spoonbillbooks.com/directions/index.htm
if so, I like it.

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or

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3319/3588856682_8c6c5edbf9.jpg

Other terrific NY novels:

John Dos Passos - Manhattan Transfer
EL Doctorow - City of God
Siri Hustvedt - What I Loved
Ralph Ellison - Invisible Man

washington square and 'an international episode' by henry james
joe gould's secret by joseph mitchell
a rage in harlem by chester himes
clockers by richard price
any of the 'scudder' novels by lawrence block

Or any of the 87th Precinct novels by Ed McBain

I'd probably recommend Manhattan Transfer over anything on this thread actually, such a fantastic, cacophonous picture of pre-Depression New York.

I read Manhattan Transfer over what seemed like months in summer 2000 and became fond of it, though never sure it really cohered or that JDP knew quite what he was doing; or maybe I was just confused by the amazingly extensive time it covered (in which I seem to remember the main female character changed her name several times and didn't get any older).

Washington Square is certainly a good way into James - it also appears in the NYRB edition of his New York Stories: that might be a recommendation.

third from left

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3566/3372645234_637393792f.jpg

and let's not forget Sylvia Plath's fabulous account of getting a stomach bug from eating caviare in Manhattan! a NYC favourite for me:

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3464/3372645038_eb174fd778.jpg

I once asked the same question somewhere in the forgotten outer boroughs of ILx's past. Someone - I think Laurel but maybe Tracer - recommended "The Colossus Of New York" by Colson Whitehead, and it was a good recommendation.

for a knoxvillian's take on brooklyn, james agee's long essay is pretty hard to beat:

http://www.amazon.com/Brooklyn-Southeast-Island-Travel-Notes/dp/0823224929

(it wasn't me Tim - i've never read it)

Ah, OK. Maybe Laurel then.

I loved "The Unposessed" by Tess Slesinger, lefties-during-depression stuff. It's a book I'd probably never have picked up had it not been an NYRB classic. Talking of which, I want to read "Three Bedrooms In Manhattan" by Georges Simenon, which sound great, and I will read it by the time I next go to NYC. I WILL.

I don't think it was me!! Although I did read his book The Intuitionist for a book club and people liked it. I never finished it, but I distinctly remember some of the ideas proposed, they're in my thinking about elevators & escalators all the time now.

I read Manhattan Transfer over what seemed like months in summer 2000 and became fond of it, though never sure it really cohered or that JDP knew quite what he was doing

I'm not really sure it's meant to cohere, I like its feel of hurtling towards a biblical disaster that never quite occurs.

As far as recent NYC fiction goes, people seem to rate Joseph O'Neill's Netherland very highly but I can't say it did much for me.

http://www.nytimes.com/packages/khtml/2005/06/05/books/20050605_BOOKMAP_GRAPHIC.html

Nobody repped for Paula Fox's Desperate Characters yet?

Manhatten Transfer was my first thought because it attempts to cram the whole life of the city into one teeming splurge. I love the constant talk about getting to "the centre of things". Gearing up for USA at the moment - so daunting to have three novels merged into one colossal volume like that.

I love both Claire Messud's The Emperor's Children and Jay McInerney's Brightness Falls - mixing detailed social comedy and a sense of doom in a way that I'm a sucker for (see also: The Beautiful and Damned, Appointment in Samarra)

Also agree with Clockers, Bonfire of the Vanities, What I Loved and Motherless Brooklyn.

For great narrative non-fiction, Ladies and Gentlemen the Bronx is Burning hits it out of the park.

I've been asked for one of these for a colleague of Mrs K's preholiday reading. He wants a feel for the place. I was planning on suggesting Manhattan Transfer, the two Lethems, and American Psycho.

However, apparently he's mostly into his classics and I don't have a clue about that. Any ideas? He's currently reading Washington Square.

I am in NYC! West 20th Street.

I have only brought one NYC book: my 12-year-old Rough Guide to New York City.

Really a good intro to the excellent Edith Wharton:
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/backissues/2012/02/nobody-likes-edith-wharton.html

Also your friend might like the New York chapters of Sister Carrie. The principal characters take unscheduled flight to the crucial, truly Big Apple. Good stuff about Sweet ( going Sour) Home Chicago too.

That looks very promising, thanks.

I'm confused. How can you get a feel for what NYC is like by reading the classics? Well, I mean ... you've got to go with something at least a little modern, right?

Pinefox, eat some pizza and bagels! I liked the Cindy Sherman exhibit at the MOMA (but that might not be your thing) and the MOMA is great in general ... but expensive! I think it is free on Friday evenings though, if I remember correctly. The MET is always free though (suggested donations).

( ^ unsolicited recommendations. forgive me. New York gets me excited.)

Hm yes, that's a point.

I don't know, I avoid anything older than about Conrad myself and never really understand why anyone would regularly go back further. But lots of folk do, I always assumed there was some kind of modern relevance for them - but maybe that doesn't really apply to place. New York's got a rich enough history that e.g. turn-of-the-(20th)-century stuff could still resonate, no?

As M. White suggested a while ago, Joseph Mitchell's Up in the Old Hotel is a great read, and also gives a thorough portrait of the city in the 1920s, 30s, and 40s.

I just finished reading Patti Smith's Just Kids and Edmund White's City Boy: My Life in New York During the 1960s and 1970s. Along with James Wolcott and Will Hermes's books, and the Fran Liebowitz/Scorcese conversation documentary, that's a lot of coverage of the same era of literature/art/music in NYC--but with the White book especially (which I'd recommend over Just Kids), I was aware of how much the public lives of these writers/artists shaped how I imagined artist/writers' lives to be.

Leroi Jones' Black Music collects his columns from Downbeat when it was a weekly, in the 60s (actually I think some of this is from end of the 50s too), and he also does features, writes liner notes and other notes, profiles young turks (some of whome vanished or diminished), goes out to Roy Haynes' Long Island home to interview and be given a good talking-to by the thriving modern jazzman, who isn't so thrilled with some of the future Baraka's attitudinizing--I sometimes suspected hin of using the New Thing advocacy for all kinds of trolling, some of it richly deserved, other times not so much, or at all. Anyway, he's a wonderful writer, totally together (later more erratic as a poet/ranter), when rock writing was a-borning and before. Gives me a sense of what it wwas like to be part of NYC's cultural surging in those years--not that it's all paisley inevitable, plenty of urban shadows around Trane, Ra, Cecil Taylor etc (haven't read Blues People but think it's compatible)

also this
http://www.rawdc.com/images/shit-love-saves-the-day.jpg

Grass roots Nooo Yawwwwk

a hazard of new fortunes - william dean howells
call it sleep - henry roth

the pinefox has a very slim copy of ulysses.