
Here is New York (1949)

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
He had an astonishing visual memory, wide cultural references, and a graceful style on the page.
Natalie Dykstra • Chasing Beauty: The Life of Isabella Stewart Gardner
He had a theory about it. It happened, and re-happened, because it was a city uninterested in history. Strange things occurred precisely because there was no necessary regard for the past. The city lived in a sort of everyday present. It had no need to believe in itself as a London, or an Athens, or even a signifier of the New World, like a Sydney,
... See moreColum McCann • Let the Great World Spin
The whole morning, the rattling ride through the flickering darkness under the East River, the updraft of Klaxons and rising office blocks that had carried them out of the subway station, the ten thousand men and women who immediately surrounded them, the ringing telephones and gum-snapping chitchat of the clerks and secretaries in Sheldon Anapol’s
... See moreMichael Chabon • The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

“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
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