New York City Pick - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0956787614 ISBN 13: 9780956787613

Publisher: Oxygen Books, 2011

Synopsis

New York is one of the most exciting and pulsating cities on earth. Here over seventy dazzling writers celebrate the richness and diversity of this amazing metropolis - the latest in this unique series featuring the best-ever writing on favourite World cities.

F Scott Fitzgerald journeys up Fifth Avenue
Bob Dylan and Suze Rotolo arrive in Greenwich Village
Alistair Cooke looks out over Central Park
David Byrne does the Five Boro Bike Tour
Edmund White finds a city of freedoms
Jan Morris recalls Manhattan 1945
Ian Frazier hears it for Brooklyn
Teju Cole encounters the Statue of Liberty
John Dos Passos pities the poor immigrant
... and much, much more.

About this title

Review

`Superb ... it's like having your own iPad loaded with different tomes, except with the best passages'
--The Times

`The beauty of this clever series is the breadth and reach of its contributors'
-- Real Travel Magazine

`What a great idea! A sublime introduction' -- Sydney Morning Herald

`All of a sudden the traditional travel guide seems a little dull ... city-pick offers a more soulful guide to the metropolises of the world'
-- The Good Web Guide

`Superb ... it's like having your own iPad loaded with different tomes, except with the best passages'
-- The Times

'The beauty of this clever series is the breadth and reach of its contributors'
-- <>Real Travel Magazine p<>'A wonderful, imaginative, creative take on New York ... a new and innovative look at the city: a perfect companion.'
-- Hot Brands & Cool Places

'An excellent, imaginative, alternative guide ... an easy way to pop in and out of the city that never sleeps -- We Love This Book

'A 250-page love letter to the king of cities ... the very best writing about New York.'
-- The Lady Adventurer

'This sublime and literary travel book operates on so many levels ... a remarkable statement about a city.'
-- The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age

'Prismatic, engrossing ... a wealth of atmospheric literary snippets that evoke the rush and heave of New York City.'
--Financial Times

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Introduction
How to create a portrait of a subject that will scarcely keep still long enough for even a digital snap? As New York hurtles past us out of its improbable history (was it really bought for a handful of beads?) and on into an unforseeable future, all we can do is gather a modest selection of the millions of words that have been written about this city of superlatives and contradictions ― a city that half the world feels it knows, even if it hasn't been there.

`This beautiful bedlam and chaos of New York,' writer Alfred Kazin called it, while in City of God E. L. Doctorow recalls Walt Whitman's description of the `bustle and din, the sublimity, the exuberant arrogance, of the living moment' which defines the city. But Emerson referred to it as `a sucked orange', and Saul Bellow called it `stirring, insupportable, agitated, ungovernable, demonic' (but then he preferred Chicago). It has been called a place where you need to wear your heart on your sleeve and your tongue in your cheek ― a place where, according to Quentin Crisp, `everyone who isn't shooting you is your friend'. If New York were a person, it would be an implausible one, so full of contradictory impulses and origins as to necessitate a great deal of time with its analyst, no doubt ...
Quite early on in the editing process I gave up trying to cover every aspect of this astonishing city or to include every possible text. There is enough good writing on New York to make a dozen anthologies and, as usual, a number of worthy and/or well-known books didn't make it through to the final selection. In some cases this was the difficulty of extracting relevant material from texts set in New York but which tend to take the city as a `given' and so do not include much in the way of useful description but concentrate on human relationships and actions (as a writer native to the desert would omit descriptions of sand). Thus, for example, there is nothing from Edith Wharton or Henry James, and only a snippet from Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar and Truman Capote's Breakfast at Tiffany's. Other omissions are the result of `permissions' problems, and I would direct the reader particularly to Toni Morrison's wonderful novel, Jazz, Betty Smith's A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, J. D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye, Nora Ephron's I feel bad about my neck, Patti Smith's Just Kids, and Tony Judt's The Memory Chalet for more good reading on New York.

The added complication is that the city-pick anthologies attempt not just to collect `good writing' but to act as an alternative kind of guidebook to the city. Partly for this reason, some writers appear a number of times: in certain cases, several short extracts add up to no more than a single substantial one from another writer. And sometimes ― as with Edward Rutherfurd's long saga, New York ― a number of long extracts are used because they explain or illuminate so well some key aspects of the city or its history.

Like every major city, New York has its darker side ― its poverty and its terrible tragedies: it would not give an accurate picture of the place to ignore them. While working on the book I became aware that this year marks the tenth anniversary of 9/11 and have been remembering my late brother-in-law, Frederick J. Kuo Jr. Hard-working, kind, gentle, a second-generation immigrant, he loved his city and especially the magnificent view from his office, high up in the North Tower of the World Trade Center.

To offset the weightier pieces, I have tried to ensure a suitable New York `fizz' by including plenty of very short extracts ― which need to be read like mini poems ― along with some surprises ... such as Maxim Gorky on Coney Island. As an illustrated reading list, this collection can serve as a starting point for the exploration of New York and the vast wealth of writing about it.

Whether you're travelling to the Big Apple by plane or boat, or simply in your imagination and your favourite armchair, we hope city-pick NEW YORK will enrich the journey.
Heather Reyes, 2011

Edition details

• Publisher: Oxygen Books
• Publication date: 2011
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0956787614
• ISBN 13: 9780956787613
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 268
• Editor: Reyes Heather