Gotham Gazette

The Place for New York Policy and politics

New Books About New York


New Books About New York

The list of books about New York or set in the city keeps growing. Here is a selection of the latest works about our city – from fictionalized accounts of 9/11 to subways stories.

FICTION

Two of the new novels center around 9/11.

Don DeLillo’s Falling Man takes its title from the photograph of a man falling from the North Tower on 9/11. The book, published by Scribner, takes off from that image to depict stories of people who were inside the Twin Towers that day or otherwise affected by the attacks.

A Day at the Beach by Helen Schuman is set during the 24-hour period beginning just before the planes hit the towers. In the novel, published by Houghton Mifflin, Schulman treats the terrorist attacks as a central theme in the already troubled marriage of Gerhard and Suzannah Falktopf.

Other novels include:

The Invention of Everything Else” by Samantha Hunt (Published by Houghton Mifflin Company): a father-daughter story, a love story and a literary mystery set around the New Yorker Hotel, where inventor Nikola Tesla lives out his last days.

and Maynard Jennica by Rudolph Delson (Houghton Mifflin). The two main characters, a native New Yorker and a Jewish girl from California meet on an uptown Number Six Train in the summer of 2000.

"Slacker Girl" by Alexandra Koslow (Plume): The story of a charming and unambitious woman in workaholic New York City.

NONFICTION

Following a winter when newspapers gloried in the controversy surrounding the an aging Brooke Astor and her son, two new books explore this illustrious New York family.

One, When the Astors Owned New York by Justin Kaplan (Plume) focuses on the history of several generations of Astors. The Last Mrs. Astor: A New York Story by Frances Kiernan (W.W. Norton) is a personal portrayal of New York grand dame Brooke Astor, whom Kiernan knew personally.

"South Street" by Barbara G. Mensch (Columbia Univerisity): Photographs of the lost world of Lower Manhattan's Fulton Fish Market and the lives of the fishmongers, the majority of whom were immigrants.

Subway Chronicles: Scenes from Life in New York edited by Jacquelin Cangro (Plume): Stories about the transit system recounted by those who work on the subways and those who ride them.

 



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