A hotbed for hip hop, underground culture, and unmatched creative energy, it spawned some of the most significant art of the 20th century. It was where Jean-Michel Basquiat became an avant-garde street artist and painter, swiftly achieving worldwide fame. During the years before his death at the age of 27, he shared his life with his lover and muse, Suzanne Mallouk. A runaway from an unhappy home in Canada, Suzanne first met Jean-Michel in a bar on the Lower East Side in 1980. Thus began a tumultuous and passionate relationship that deeply influenced one of the most exceptional artists of our time. In emotionally resonant prose, award-winning author Jennifer Clement tells the story of the passion that swept Suzanne and Jean-Michel into a short-lived, unforgettable affair. A poetic interpretation like no other, Widow Basquiat is an expression of the unrelenting power of addiction, obsession and love.

    After all it can’t be easy to be sixteen with a hairless “undistinguishable from that of a five year old’s.”This wonderfully entertaining memoir is a touching and humorous look at life in New York City. But this is life for an author who can proclaim “my first sexual experience was rather old-fashioned: it was with a prostitute”–an author who can talk about his desire to be a model for the Hair Club for Men and about meeting his son for the first time. Often insightful, sometimes tender, always witty and self-deprecating, What’s Not to Love? is an engaging memoir from one of our most funny, most daring writers.

    The word is out in Spanish Harlem: Willy Bodega is king.  Need college tuition for your daughter?  Start-up funds for your fruit stand?  Bodega can help.  He gives everyone a leg up, in exchange only for loyalty--and a steady income from the drugs he pushes.Lyric, inspired, and darkly funny, this powerful debut novel brilliantly evokes the trial of Chino, a smart, promising young man to whom Bodega turns for a favor.  Chino is drawn to Bodega's street-smart idealism, but soon finds himself over his head, navigating an underworld of switchblade tempers, turncoat morality, and murder.

    Photos. NPR feature.

    And what a world it is! On the surface, it looks like an ordinary city block, but as we meet Madlenka's neighbors -- the French baker, the Indian news vendor, the Italian ice-cream man, the Latin American grocer, a retired opera singer from Germany, an African American school friend, and the Asian shopkeeper -- and look through die-cut windows to the images and memories they have carried from old country to new, we can see that Madlenka's block is as richly varied as its inhabitants. And why is Madlenka going around the block, jumping for joy? Her tooth is loose, and she wants everyone to know!Madlenka is a 2000 New York Times Book Review Notable Children's Book of the Year. This title has Common Core connections.

    . .Harlem, New York.Chicken and waffles.Jazz.Home."Uptown is a rich mix of flavors, colors, sounds, and cultures that come together to create a vibrant community like no other in the world. Seen through the eyes of one little boy who lives there, the details of life in Harlem are as joyous as a game of basketball on a summer's afternoon and as personal as a trip to the barbershop where old-timers reminisce.Bryan Collier's spare, poetic text and beautiful, intricate illustrations evoke every aspect of Harlem, from the legendary Apollo Theater to chocolate-colored brownstones, weekend shopping on 125th Street, and the music of Duke Ellington.Uptown is the winner of the 2001 Coretta Scott King Illustrator Award.

    There's no need to look through dozens of photos of birds that don't live in your area. This book features 120 species of New York birds, organized by color for ease of use. Do you see a yellow bird and don't know what it is? Go to the yellow section to find out. Fact-filled information, a compare feature, range maps, and detailed photographs help to ensure that you positively identify the birds that you see.

    

    Isserman expertly tracks Harrington's beginnings in the Catholic Worke

    The cult bible of all things Thunders, it is the definitive portrait of the condemned man of rock 'n' roll, from the baptism of fire and tragedy that was the New York Dolls, through the junkie punk years of the Heartbreakers and beyond. It is an unflinching account of a unique guitarist whose drug problems often overshadowed his considerable style and talent, and whose influence on such bands as The Sex Pistols and Guns N' Roses is still resonant.

    For a kid on the streets in 1902, every day demanded wit and improvisation. Beyond the door of the tenement at 179 East 93rd Street lay rival gangs, lucky breaks, failed hustles. While his mother, Minnie, was occupied elsewhere—planning her unruly brood’s ultimate destiny—Harpo roamed the streets doing what any self-respecting second-grade dropout would: grabbing the family’s one left-foot skate and heading to Central Park, preparing for the bonfires of a Tammany election night, and hopping on the El to watch “the Gods in Valhalla—which is to say, the New York Giants in the Polo Grounds.” With an unforgettable cast of characters, and set against turn-of-the-century Manhattan, Harpo Speaks . . . About New York overflows with the optimism and sweetness of the kid who, on the off-chance that “Sandy Claus” just might remember him, never forgot to hang his stocking in the airshaft on Christmas Eve.

    David Merrick is the most astonishing showman of our time, and perhaps of all time. No other producer, not even Florenz Ziegfeld nor the combined lights of the Shubert brothers, has equalled his percentage of hits or his demonic flair for publicity. In this first-ever biography, Howard Kissel from his decade-long investigation reveals the man, the mask, and the myth of David Merrick. The charismatic and reclusive mogul emerges as a Broadway version of Howard Hughes, with his own panoply of eccentricities, genius and neuroses. Merrick's much publicized and oftentimes staged battles and feuds are re-ignited here full force with such major personalities as Barbra Streisand, Jackie Gleason, Ethel Merman, Lena Horne, Woody Allen, Peter Ustinov, Andy Griffith, Anthony Newley, Peter Brook, and Carol Channing. Over a hundred interviews with the major players in Merrick's drama from his pre-Merrick St. Louis childhood as David Margoulies to his latest divorce has yielded the first serious interrogation of a life that until now has been the sole creation of Merrick's own invention and press wizardry.

    The daughter and granddaughter of the American interior designer offer an intimate portrait of the woman who decorated for the Kennedys, the Rockefellers, the Astors, and many others of the American elite.

    Tanner made millions, became the toast of Manhattan society, and had his works adapted into wildly successful plays, musicals, TV shows, and films. But he also spent every cent he made, worked incognito as a butler to the wealthy, and constructed a persona so elaborate that not even his wife and children ever quite knew the real Pat. Based on extensive interviews with coworkers, friends, and relatives, Uncle Mame is a revealing, intimate portrait of the man who brought camp to the American mainstream and even in his lowest moments personified—even in his lowest moments— the glamour and wit he captured on the page.

    Then and Now features fascinating archival photographs contrasted with specially commissioned, full-color images of the same scene today. A visual lesson in the historic changes of our greatest urban landscapes.

    Largely through the efforts of its working class and the dynamic labor movement it built, New York City became the envied model of liberal America and the scourge of conservatives everywhere: cheap and easy-to-use mass transit, work in small businesses and factories that had good wages and benefits, affordable public housing, and healthcare for all.Working-Class New York is an "engrossing" (Dissent) account of the birth of that ideal and the way it came crashing down. In what Publishers Weekly calls "absorbing and beautifully detailed history", historian Joshua Freeman shows how the anticommunist purges of the 1950s decimated the ranks of the labor movement and demoralized its idealists, and how the fiscal crisis of the mid-1970s dealt another crushing blow to liberal ideals as the city's wealthy elite made a frenzied grab for power.A grand work of cultural and social history, Working-Class New York is a moving chronicle of a dream that died but may yet rise again.

    With this masterly and original work, Bellow: A Biography, National Book Award nominee James Atlas gives the first definitive account of the Nobel Prize–winning author’s turbulent personal and professional life, as it unfolded against the background of twentieth-century events—the Depression, World War II, the upheavals of the sixties—and amid all the complexities of the Jewish-immigrant experience in America, which generated a vibrant new literature.Drawing upon a vast body of original research, including Bellow’s extensive correspondence with Ralph Ellison, Delmore Schwartz, John Berryman, Robert Penn Warren, John Cheever, and many other luminaries of the twentieth-century literary community, Atlas weaves a rich and revealing portrait of one of the most talented and enigmatic figures in American intellectual history.Detailing Bellow’s volatile marriages and numerous tempestuous relation-ships with women, publishers, and friends, Bellow: A Biography is a magnificent chronicle of one of the premier writers in the English language, whose prize-winning works include Herzog, The Adventures of Augie March, and, most recently, Ravelstein.

    With all the authority and elegance such a subject demands, Yagoda tells the fascinating story of the tiny journal that grew into a literary enterprise of epic proportions. Incorporating interviews with more than fifty former and current New Yorker writers, including the late Joseph Mitchell, Roger Angell, the late Pauline Kael, Calvin Trillin, and Ann Beattie, Yagoda is the first author to make extensive use of the New Yorker's archives. About Town penetrates the inner workings of the New Yorker as no other book has done, opening a window on a lost age.

    But few have had a feel for the city that Jay Maisel has.Jay has been photographing New York since the '50s. His home is located far downtown, but he has shot every part of the city -- from street level, looking down from rooftops and bridges. His aerial shots are moody, poetic, amazing by turns.This book is filled with spectacular sights -- marathon runners on bridges, sunlight and moonlight reflecting off mirror walls onto the river, the awesome mass of skyscrapers bunched against blue skies. It's also about New York's people. It has the most surprising faces and details you'll see in any book about cities, gleaned from a lifetime of being on the scene.Jay Maisel's New York is one of the most beautiful books of the year.

    Examining race, class, and society in Brooklyn over three centuries from the colonial period to the present, A Covenant with Color maps out the genesis, transformation, and dissemination of racial beliefs -- observing them in action "on the ground."

    Wonderful Town, an anthology of superb short fiction by many of the magazine's most accomplished contributors, celebrates the seventy-five-year marriage between a preeminent publication and its preeminent context with this collection of forty-four of its best stories from (so to speak) home. East Side? Philip Roth's chronically tormented alter ego Nathan Zuckerman has just moved there, in "Smart Money." West Side? Isaac Bashevis Singer's narrator mingles with the customers in "The Cafeteria" (who debate politics and culture in four or five different languages) and becomes embroiled in an obsessional romance. And downtown, John Updike's Maples have begun their courtship of marital disaster, in "Snowing in Greenwich Village." John Cheever, John O'Hara, Lorrie Moore, Irwin Shaw, Woody Allen, Laurie Colwin, Saul Bellow, J. D. Salinger, Jean Stafford, Vladimir Nabokov--they and many other stellar literary guides to the city will be found in these pages. Wonderful Town touches on some of the city's famous places and stops at some of its more obscure corners, but the real guidebook in and between its lines is to the hearts and the minds of those who populate the metropolis built by its pages. Like all good fiction, these stories take particular places, particular people, and particular events and turn them into dramas of universal enlightenment and emotional impact. The five boroughs are the five continents. New York is every great and ordinary place. Each life in it, and each life in Wonderful Town, is the life of us all.

    From the Gothic stone arches and gossamer steel webbing of the Brooklyn Bridge (perhaps the greatest engineering achievement of the 19th century), to the Verrazano-Narrows — the world's longest suspension bridge when completed in 1964 — more than 75 bridges span the city's waterways. This book is a stirring text-and-picture tribute to these awe-inspiring structures.Beginning with Dutch New Amsterdam and continuing to the modern era and the achievements of legendary bridge builder Robert Moses, The Bridges of New York covers nearly 300 years of New York history and a century of accomplishments in modern engineering. At the time of construction, many of the bridges were considered breakthroughs in bridge-building technology.Grouped according to geography and economics — two prime considerations facing bridge engineers — the spans are described in a highly readable text that explains the design principles of cantilever, swing, bascule, and many other bridge types. Over 150 archival engravings and contemporary photographs document the splendor of such remarkable bridges as the Brooklyn, George Washington, Bronx-Whitestone, Manhattan, Queensboro, Triborough, and dozens of smaller spans.A section on bridge maintenance, a glossary, and charts noting each bridge's location, length, height, and other features complete this pictorial treasury — sure to delight engineering and architecture enthusiasts as well as anyone who has ever been astonished by the extraordinary scale and grandeur of New York's bridges.

    Ichthyologist Waldman's survey of New York Harbor, from the 17th century, when it teemed with marine life to its rebirth today; with many old and new photographs.

    Every corner of this fascinating metropolis is here, including the East Village, Chelsea, the Upper West Side, revitalized Harlem, the winding paths of Central Park, and the outlying boroughs.

    Bringing together a variety of past literary figures as well as emerging talents, this comprehensive book captures the Zeitgeist of the neighborhood through the eyes of its writers. Included are selections from the writings of Jack Kerouac, Mark Twain, James Baldwin, James Fenimore Cooper, Tom Wolfe, Herman Wouk, Theodore Dreiser, Washington Irving, Clifford Odets, Cynthia Ozick, Grace Paley, Edgar Allan Poe, Chaim Potok, Kate Simon, Leon Trotsky, and Sholem Aleichem. Lloyd Ultan and Barbara Unger place the literature of these and other writers in historical context and reproduce one hundred vintage photographs that bring the writings to life. Filtered through the imaginations of authors of different times, ethnic groups, social classes, and literary styles, the borough of The Bronx emerges not only as a shaper of destinies and lives, but as an important literary mecca.

    Introductory essays to each work by some of theatre's most distinguished artists give historical and critical perspective to Gardner's achievement. Includes: A THOUSAND CLOWNS - THE GOODBYE PEOPLE - THIEVES - I'M NOT RAPPAPORT - CONVERSATIONS WITH MY FATHER - WHO IS HARRY KELLERMAN AND WHY IS HE SAYING THOSE TERRIBLE THINGS ABOUT ME?.

    Cantwell's first book, American Girl, evoked the delights of her youth in a small New England town; her second, Manhattan, When I Was Young, told of her blossoming career in New York, her marriage and her children, and that marriage's decline. Speaking with Strangers finds Cantwell alone, a single mother struggling in the big city, bereft of her husband but bolstered by friends, thriving in her career yet personally troubled. With a sensibility as distinct as the city she calls home, Cantwell's autobiographical trilogy brilliantly captures her struggle to forge a life with one foot in her past and the other, warily, in her present.

    This work investigates the most prolonged period of such conflict - the Flatbush Boycott of 1990, when Black nationalist and Haitian activists led a boycott and picketing campaign against two Korean-owned produce stores.

    When she gets lost in Times Square while shopping for souvenirs, she is saved by her own cleverness—and a Statue of Liberty night-light.

    Wall Street speculators, the Manhattan downtown club scene, Russian gangsters, immigrant neighborhoods - all the elements in the urban turf of this finely crafted contemporary crime novel wed danger with excitement and possibility. They're the rewards that Monty Brogan, who stands at the center of the moral glare in this tale, has already lost, just as he's lost his Corvette, and the "sway" that opened the doors of exclusive night spots and guaranteed him courtside seats at Madison Square Garden. Tomorrow Monty's traveling by bus, to the federal prison in Otisville, for seven years. He's afraid, and all he'd ever really wanted when he grew up was to be a fireman. With the pulse of the city in its prose, this debut novel follows Monty through the twenty-four hours of his last day out. At the same time, it illuminates the worlds, and souls, of his two best friends: Frank Slattery, an edgy bond trader who gambles daily with financial ruin, and Jakob Elinsky, an English teacher who clings to illusions as he compromises his ideals. Friends since their high school days, the three of them nostalgically share a past, but warily they confront a future that can no longer accommodate their adolescent dreams. They meet. They drink, and talk, go clubbing, dance, drink, and remember. What neither Slattery nor Jakob know, however, is that Monty has a plan. It's a shocker.Originally published: New York: Carroll & Graf Pub., 2000.

    David McCullough sees Truman, F. Murray Abraham deconstructs Brooklynese, Jerry Della Famina describes those hot summer nights, and Nora Guthrie remembers living with her father Woody in Coney Island. There's the West Indian Day parade and the Neptune Parade, Ebbet's Field Sym-phony and Norman Mailer in a homeless shelter, pigeon-racing and parakeets in Green-wood Cemetery, Junior's cheesecake, the judge in the Gotti trial, the world's best handball player, and a wise guy's guide to dining. BROOKLYN, the book, tells it all. Packed with the accent, the attitude, the smarts, with nostalgia, respect, awe, laughter and news, BROOKLYN taps into one of Brooklyn's best resources-its army of writers-to tell the story of America's home town. For over 250 years immigrants from all over the world have lived in the neighborhood called Brooklyn, and fanned out to the rest of the country. An 81 square mile patchwork of city, college town, quiet fishing village, industrial center, bedroom community, and seaport, Brooklyn is the Dodgers, Walt Whitman, Mrs. Stahl's knishes, the bridge-and BROOKLYN, an obsessive and definitive book that's as colorful, interesting, and quirky as the world it celebrates. Fugehdabboudit!

    How can it organize, teach and offer therapy in ways that are relevant to the diverse complex and social and cultural groups of people who seek psychological help? How should it adapt to demands for accountability and evidence? How can it cope in a climate of competition and market share? Should it cleave to medicine or abandon it? Define itself as a science or an art or an ethical practice?

    Generations of visitors and residents alike have pondered the city's enduring quirks and unusual traditions. In the F.Y.I. column in The New York Times, the paper's reporters and editors turn their talents to answering readers' most perplexing queries about the city, some of which include:* City with a Past: Where was the World Trade Center originally going to be located? Where was the last opium den in New York?* Underground, Underfoot: Is there a secret tunnel linking Police Headquarters to a nearby tavern? What was the busiest day in subway history?* The Name Game: Is there really a Main Street in Manhattan? What was the Street of Brides?* And lots more!Amply illustrated with Stuart Goldenberg's whimsical cartoons, and with an introduction from Constance Rosenblum, editor of the Times's City section, Only in New York is sure to generate laughter, delight, and Aha! reactions in anyone who has ever been stumped by one of Gotham's countless oddities.