Recommendations
for New York City
Invisible Cities
Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else.
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.
Mitchell Joachim
The Year of Magical Thinking
Stunning candor and piercing details. The "Year of Magical Thinking" is an indelible portrait of loss and grief, based in New York City.
Melissa Unger
Project for a Revolution in New York
Part prophecy and part erotic fantasy, this classic tale of otherworldly depravity features New York itself.
The city is the protagonist. A maze about politics, activism, art. Very related to the Marquis de Sade.
Hans-Ulrich Obrist
Lunch Poems
New York poems like profound tweets. These lines never get old.
Flaka Haliti
Chronic City
Manhattanites wrapped in their own delusions, desires, and lies.
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.
Martin Fengel
The Long-Winded Lady: Notes from the New Yorker
Maeve Brennan is famous for her observations. What she sees, sad and funny, everyday and bizarre, adds up to amazing, unforgettable stories about life in the small restaurants, in the cheap hotels, in the parks and on the busy streets around Times Square and Greenwich Village.
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.
Ricarda Messner
I Seem to Live
Jonas Mekas and his brother made their first experimental films in New York in 1950. He developed the diary film format in which he recorded his everyday observations. "I Seem to Live" is a continuation of this endeavour and his key literary work.
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.
Kelly Taxter
The Blazing World
With "The Blazing World" Siri Hustvedt returns to the New York art world. The book is a polyphonic tour de force about the power of prejudice, desire, money, fame, and the patriarchy in the art business in the time around 9/11.
Ruscha Voormann
Valley Of The Dolls
Decades ahead of its time, the steamy novel follows three ambitious girls who climb the ladder of showbiz until they hit rock bottom in New York City in the 60ies. Emotional dependencies, drug addiction, comprehensive personality disorder - all included in this story-for romance with tears and oral sex.
And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks
A combination of hardened thriller and existentialist lament. An essential document of the beat generation.
Just Kids
The autobiographical novel tells the moving story of a New York friendship in the early 1970s and Smith's rise to become an icon of the punk movement.
Manhattan Transfer
Open City
A lonely, attentive wanderer encounters multicultural New York and its invisible stories on his tours trough the city.
All the Rivers
Romeo and Juliet today: An impossible love story between a Jew and a Palestinian exiled in New York.
Harlem Is Nowhere: A Journey to the Mecca of Black America
A pilgrimage, a celebration and a cautionary note. Rhodes-Pitt honors the dreamers who imagine what Harlem could be, without losing sight of how reality thwarts everything.
Sleepless Nights
Go Tell It on the Mountain
"Go Tell It on the Mountain" is a 1953 semi-autobiographical novel by James Baldwin. It tells the story of John Grimes, an intelligent teenager in 1930s Harlem, and his relationship to his family and his church. The novel also reveals the back stories of John's mother, his biological father, and his violent, religious fanatic stepfather.
Land of Men
A fiercely personal memoir about coming of age in the male-dominated literary world of the nineties in New York, It's about Adrienne Miller becoming the first female literary editor of Esquire, and her personal and working relationship with David Foster Wallace.