Here is New York (1949)
“Ha! Forget it. Central Park itself isn’t safe, these men of vision, they dream about CPW to Fifth Avenue solid with gracious residences. Meantime the Newspaper of Record goes around in a little pleated skirt shaking pompoms, leaping in the air with an idiot grin if so much as a cement mixer passes by. The only way to live here is not to get attach
... See moreThomas Pynchon • Bleeding Edge
You’d see them stop and pull out their pads or notebooks to jot down something that had just struck them—the color of the sky, the bend of a street, an incongruity. These notes were postcards to literature that we never mailed.
Anatole Broyard • Kafka Was the Rage: A Greenwich Village Memoir
He’d once told me that the art of getting ahead in New York was based on learning how to express dissatisfaction in an interesting way.
Don DeLillo • White Noise
So, as we enter this description, we’re asking, somewhere in the back of our reading mind: How is this description of a road going to turn out to be essential, i.e., not wasteful?
George Saunders • A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: From the Man Booker Prize-winning, New York Times-bestselling author of Lincoln in the Bardo
New York in 1932 was half-completed skyscrapers, work on them long since halted for the lack of funds, that glared down on the city from glassless windows.
Robert A. Caro • The Power Broker
Joseph Mitchell both described and conjured the dazzling world of New York when it was really New York — the characters, the grit, the language.
Michael Rosenwald • ‘I wish this guy hadn’t written this book’
things, it is said, are duly recorded -- all things of importance, that is. But not quite, for actually it is only the known, the seen, the heard and only those events that the recorder regards as important that are put down, those lies his keepers keep their power by. But the cop would be Clifton's historian, his judge, his witness, and his execut
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