What to Read in New York City
1) <em>The Colossus of New York</em>, by Colson Whitehead
Anchor
amazon.com
$10.59
You likely know Colson Whitehead from his Pulitzer Prize-winning novels, The Underground Railroad and The Nickel Boys, but Whitehead is also a terrific nonfiction writer. Descend into the sensory slipstream of New York with these freeform odes to everything from the subway to Central Park to Coney Island. Speaking of morning sunlight on grimy snowdrifts, Whitehead writes, “Five minutes is all it takes for this city to break you.” The same could be said of this enchanting book, a slim gem that brings New York’s beauty and ugliness to life.
2) <em>St. Marks Is Dead</em>, by Ada Calhoun
W. W. Norton & Company
amazon.com
$17.92
If you’re headed to New York to explore the nightlife, dip into this essential cultural history about one of its hippest streets: St. Marks Avenue, located in the ever-changing East Village. Born and raised on St. Marks, Calhoun brings a local perspective to this 400-year history of the singular street, from its Dutch colonial origins through its many changing faces: headquarters for union organizers in the early 1900s, a hotspot for mobsters during Prohibition, a hangout for Beats during the 1950s, then dizzyingly onward through hippies and punks and gentrifiers. According to disgruntled locals, St. Marks is always in its death throes, but Calhoun captures it as an important site of cultural production and transformation. Read it before sampling the street’s many charms yourself.
3) <em>A Tree Grows in Brooklyn</em>, by Betty Smith
Harper Perennial
amazon.com
$13.39
No book screams “summer in the city” quite like A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Betty Smith’s classic novel about Francie Nolan’s coming-of-age in turn of the century Brooklyn. Our story opens in the summer of 1912, with tweenage Francie and her younger brother rifling through the Williamsburg slums in search of scraps they can sell to the junkman. Sensitive and determined, Francie holds the family together between her father’s drinking and her mother’s meager earnings, all while reading her way toward a better life. At once a heartfelt family saga and an unsparing portrait of poverty, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn an American classic well worth revisiting as you sip on an overpriced latté in Francie’s backyard.
4) <em>Netherland</em>, by Joseph O'Neill
Vintage
amazon.com
$13.33
In a New York City still reeling from 9/11, Dutch banker Hans van den Broeck separates from his wife when she takes their young son home to London, away from the “ideologically diseased” United States. Alone in a city he no longer recognizes, Hans joins a cricket league of Asian and Caribbean immigrants led by Chuck Ramkissoon, a charismatic Trinidadian umpire with a criminal side hustle. Through cricket, these unlikely friends escape the loneliness and anonymity of a scarred New York, but nothing gold can stay, especially in a country that isn’t kind to immigrant strivers. Told with the wistful lyricism of a young Fitzgerald, Netherland is a powerful story of love, loss, and cultural discombobulation. In the “melting pot that just won’t melt,” as Tony Kushner once called it, the novel speaks powerfully to New York’s multiculturalism.
Heading into the city for a long weekend? Pack a history of East Village nightlife, or maybe a classic Brooklyn coming-of-age novel.