This is a riveting classic. It flows with descriptive representations of impossible places and odd times. Calvino knows how to image a city with visceral detail. For me, this book unpacks New York, as a fantasy within a fantasy - ever-changing and therefore never truly knowing.    

This book focuses on a rather privileged and specific literary class that has inhabited New York City for ages. It is an elegant exploration of what happens read more

The city is the protagonist. A maze about politics, activism, art. Very related to the Marquis de Sade.

Travels always with me...I switch to it when I get tired and have no concentration for “my other academic books”. He describe his mood of writing as a phone call to a friend - defining as personalism... read more

Chronic Cities describes the New York mood pretty well, in a neighborhood where I've rarely been when I was living in New York, the Upper West Side. There's a lot of good characters and a tiger walking through New York, too. It reminds me of my time in this city, when I also did not understand much.

Anyone with a special relationship with New York should read this! Between 1954 and 1981, Maeve Brennan alias The Long-Winded Lady wrote the "Talk of the Town" column for The New Yorker. This book is a collection of her essays. About the most ruthless, ambitious, confusing, funny, sad, cold and humane city.

Jonas Mekas’s New York diary illuminates not just the inner life of an incredible artist and cultural impresario, the key moments and players in the development of his pioneering diaristic aesthetic,  but  it also documents the evolution of the city’s explosive art scene. Jonas witnessed artists such as Andy Warhol, George Maciunas, Yoko Ono, Michael Snow, and so many others experimenting with new forms of art making- what we now take for granted as interdisciplinary- was just then only coming into view. 

The main plot is set in New York at the turn of the millennium. The centre of the story is the widowed artist Harriet Burden, who plans an experiment after the death of her husband, a famous and very successful art dealer. She publishes her work of art, which the scene has largely ignored or ridiculed, under the identity of three selected male artists in order to expose the art scene and prove that gender plays a far too great role. read more