He has run the toughest city in America with an independence and show of ego that first brought him great success—and eventually threatened it. Yet while Bloomberg is internationally known and admired, few people know the man behind the carefully crafted public persona.In Mike Bloomberg, Joyce Purnick explores Mr. Bloomberg's life from his childhood in the suburbs of Boston, to his rise on Wall Street and the creation of Bloomberg L.P., to his mayoral record and controversial gamble on a third term. Drawing on her deep knowledge of New York City politics, and interviews with Bloomberg's friends, family, colleagues, and the mayor himself, she creates a textured portrait of one of the more complex men of our era.

    He is a Chassidic Orthodox Jew and the son of a revered rabbi in whose footsteps he's expected to follow. When he leaves his insular world to take classes at a secular college, he vows to remain unchanged...Praise for A Seat at the Table: "A poignant depiction of a deeply loving father and a no less loving son desperate to find his own very different path without shattering the connection to his family, to his father."-- Rabbi Joseph Telushkin, Author of Jewish Literacy and a Jewish Code of Ethics "Halberstam takes you deeply into the Chassidic community with a critical eye but a loving, understanding heart. This tender, compassionate coming-of-age story brims over with wisdom from the Jewish tradition. It's worth reading for the Chassidic tales alone."-- David Grubin, Documentary Filmmaker, The Jewish Americans, LBJ"Joshua Halberstam knows the soul of Chassidic Brooklyn better than anyone without payes and a black hat. He explores that world with a unique combination of skepticism and compassion. A Seat at the Table is a lovely and deeply humane book."-- Melvin Jules Bukiet, Author of Strange Fire and Neurotica"In this novel of fathers and sons, faith and doubt, Joshua Halberstam illuminates a world rich with religious tradition and Chassidic stories, and he proves himself to be a master storyteller in his own right. A Seat at the Table is unusually wise, genuine, and always affecting." -- Tova Mirvis, author of The Ladies Auxiliary and The Outside World

    In 1942 Elizabeth Bynam Sanders was a young woman who left home under false pretenses and travelled to Our Lady of Victory, a home for unwed mothers in upstate New York. Shortly after surrendering her daughter for adoption, she returned to her life in Johnston County, North Carolina. She never married and never had another child of her own. This powerful and moving memoir speaks of the profound need for connection. It is a story about identity, the hunger we feel for a sense of belonging and the ineffable significance of blood.

    Homes, author of The Mistress’s Daughter"Maggie Estep is the bastard daughter of Raymond Chandler and Anaïs Nin. Her prose is hard-boiled and sexy; she turns a good phrase and shows some leg."—Jonathan Ames, author of Wake Up, Sir!Alice Hunter is a thirty-six-year-old professional gambler living in Queens, New York. She is modestly successful as a horseplayer and enjoys her work. Though avidly pursued by her lover, Clayton, who she refers to as The Big Oaf, Alice's closest companion is Candy, a small spotted dog, and Alice likes it that way. When Clayton's overzealousness leads Alice to ask one of her racetrack cronies to intimidate Clayton into leaving her, a few things go wrong and Alice turns to her half-sister Eloise, a toy maker, whose own lover has just been killed in a freak accident.There is fierce love between Alice, Eloise, and Kimberly (their unconventional mother), but it takes Alice's accidental discovery of an awful secret Kimberly has been keeping to truly bring three eccentric women, seventeen dogs, and assorted lovers together.Maggie Estep has published six books, including Hex, a New York Times Notable Book of 2003. Her work has appeared in many magazines and anthologies including: Brooklyn Noir, Queens Noir, Aloud: Voices from the Nuyorican Poets Café, The Best American Erotica, and The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry. She has performed her work in a wide variety of venues ranging from Lincoln Center to Lollapalooza, Charlie Rose, and HBO's Def Poetry Jam. She lives in Woodstock, New York.

     Drawing on his uncommon background and global perspective, in Breaking Ground Daniel Libeskind explores ideas about tragedy and hope, and the way in which architecture can memorialize-and reshape-human experience. Born in 1946 to Holocaust survivors in Poland, Daniel Libeskind eventually emigrated to New York City in 1959. A virtuoso musician before studying architecture, Libeskind has designed iconic buildings around the world, including the Jewish Museum Berlin and the Imperial War Museum in Manchester, England. In February 2003, Libeskind was chosen as the Master Plan Architect for the World Trade Center reconstruction. Full of the vitality, humor, and visionary spark that helped win him the Trade Center Commission, Breaking Ground invites readers to see architecture-and the larger world-through new perspectives.

    It’s a professional coup, but her new job comes with more complications than Cate ever anticipated.Cate’s roommate Renee will do anything to nab the plum job of beauty editor at Gloss. But snide comments about Renee’s weight send her into an emotional tailspin. Soon she is taking black market diet pills—despite the racing heartbeat and trembling hands that signal she's heading for real danger.Then there’s Abby, whom they take in as a third roommate. Once a joyful graduate student working as a nanny part time, she abruptly fled a seemingly happy life in the D.C. suburbs. No one knows what shattered Abby—or why she left everything she once loved behind.Pekkanen’s most compelling, true-to-life novel yet tells the story of three very different women as they navigate the complications of careers and love—and find the lifeline they need in each other.

    Now he presents an exquisite collection that captures the full range of his work and the magic of chance encounters in New York City. Hayes's "frank, beautiful, bewitching" street photographs "unmask their subjects' best and truest selves" (Jennifer Senior, New York Times): A policeman pauses at the end of a day. Cooks sneak in cigarette breaks. A pair of movers plays cards on the back of a truck. Friends claim the sidewalk. Lovers embrace. A flame-haired girl gazes mysteriously into the lens. And park benches provide a setting for a couple of hunks, a mom and her baby, a stylish nonagenarian . . . How New York Breaks Your Heart reveals ordinary New Yorkers at their most peaceful, joyful, distracted, anxious, expressive, and at their most fleeting--bringing the texture of the city to vivid life. Woven through with Hayes's lyric reflections, these photos will, like the city itself, break your heart by asking you to fall in love.

    When Bill Bratton was sworn in as New York City's police commissioner in 1994, he made what many considered a bold promise: The NYPD would fight crime in every borough...and win.  It seemed foolhardy; even everybody knows you can't win the war on crime.  But Bratton delivered.  In an extraordinary twenty-seven months, serious crime in New York City went down by 33 percent, the murder rate was cut in half--and Bill Bratton was heralded as the most charismatic  and respected law enforcement official in America..  In this outspoken account of his news-making career, Bratton reveals how his cutting-edge policing strategies brought about the historic reduction in crime.Bratton's success made national news and landed him on the cover of Time.  It also landed him in political hot water.  Bratton earned such positive press that before he'd completed his first week on the job, the administration of New York's media-hungry mayor Rudolph Giuliani, threatened to fire him.  Bratton gives a vivid, behind-the-scenes look at the sizzle and substance, and he pulls no punches describing the personalities who really run the city.Bratton grew up in a working-class Boston neighborhood, always dreaming of being a cop.  As a young officer under Robert di Grazia, Boston's progressive police commissioner, he got a ground-level view of real police reform and also saw what happens when an outspoken, dynamic, reform-minded police commissioner starts to outshine an ambitious mayor.  He was soon in the forefront of the community policing movement and a rising star in the profession.  Bratton had turned around four major police departments when he accepted the number one police job in America.When Bratton arrived at the NYPD, New York's Finest were almost hiding; they had given up on preventing crime and were trying only to respond to it.  Narcotics,  Vice,  Auto Theft, and the Gun Squads all worked banker's hours while the competition--the bad guys--worked around the clock.  Bratton changed that.  He brought talent to the top and instilled pride in the force; he listened to the people in the neighborhoods and to the cops on the street.  Bratton and his "dream team" created Compstat, a combination of computer statistics analysis and an unwavering demand for accountability.  Cops were called on the carpet, and crime began to drop.  With Bratton on the job, New York City was turned around.Today, New York's plummeting crime rate and improved quality of life remain a national success story.  Bratton is directly responsible, and his strategies are being studied and implemented by police forces across the country and around the world.  In Turnaround, Bratton shows how the war on crime can be won once and for all.

    He conveniently overlooked the fact that many of them died young, broke, and miserable. In his candid, wistful, touching, and hilarious memoir, Poseur, the music journalist, playwright, author, and blogger recounts his misspent years as a suburban kid searching for authenticity, dangerous fun, and druggy, downtown glory: first during New York’s last era of risk and edge, the pre-gentrification ’90s, and finally as a flamboyant and notorious rock writer, partying and posing during the music industry’s heady, decadent last gasp.Part profane, confidential tell-all and part sweetly frank coming-of-age tale, this dirty, witty memoir finds Spitz careening through the scene, meeting and sometimes clashing with cultural icons like Courtney Love, Jeff Buckley, Rivers Cuomo of Weezer, Chloë Sevigny, Kim Deal, The Dandy Warhols, Guns N’ Roses, Ryan Adams, Paul Rudd, Coldplay, Pavement, Peter Dinklage, Julie Bowen, The Strokes, Trent Reznor, Chuck Klosterman, Interpol, and Franz Ferdinand, as well as meeting heroes like Allen Ginsberg, Shirley Clarke, Joe Strummer, and Morrissey. Along the way he finds literary guru Gordon Lish is a long-lost relative, and erstwhile pal and sensation JT LeRoy is an even bigger poseur.Spitz refuses to give up the romantic ghost until a post–9/11 breakdown and an improbable new love (fellow music writer Lizzy Goodman) finally help him strike the hardest pose of all: his true self.

    The first novel, The Sins of the Fathers, appeared in 1975, and A Drop of the Hard Stuff—the 17th and most recent—was published in 2011. Over the years Scudder has also been featured in 11 short works of fiction; Out the Window, which first appeared in AHMM in 1977, is the first of them.Out the Window and A Candle for the Bag Lady kept Scudder alive for me after Dell failed to sell the first three books effectively. There seemed little point in trying to interest another publisher in a series that had already proved unsuccessful, but I couldn't abandon Scudder, and wrote the two novelettes for magazine publication. Then I wrote the fourth novel, A Stab in the Dark, and Don Fine published it at Arbor House, and Scudder was back in business.Out the Window is included in The Night and the Music, my collection of all 11 Matthew Scudder short stories, available for Kindle or in handsome trade paperback form.

    Raised by her father, owner of New York City's glamorous Gregory Hotels, after her mother's death, Nina was taught that family, reputation, and legacy are what matter most. And her boyfriend Tim, thoughtful, kind, and honest, not to mention her best friend since childhood, feels the same. But after Nina's father passes away, she learns he may not have practiced what he preached. As her world falls apart, Nina begins to question everything she thought she knew and to see the men in her life--her father, her boyfriend, and unexpectedly, her handsome and attentive boss, Rafael--in a new light. Soon Nina finds herself caught between the world she knows and loves, and a passion that could upend everything.More than Words is a heartbreaking and romantic novel about grief, loss, love, and self-discovery, and how we choose which life we are meant to live.

    The Empire State Building is the companion volume to the Museum of the City of New York's definitive exhibition: "A Dream Well Planned: The Empire State Building."

    So when the guilt-ridden husband who abandoned her shows up and offers to take care of their kids for the summer, she accepts his offer and escapes rural Pennsylvania for New York City.Usually grounded and mild mannered, Amy finally lets her hair down in the city that never sleeps. She discovers a life filled with culture, sophistication, and—with a little encouragement from her friends—a few blind dates. When one man in particular makes quick work of Amy’s heart, she risks losing herself completely in the unexpected escape, and as the summer comes to an end, Amy realizes too late that she must make an impossible decision: stay in this exciting new chapter of her life, or return to the life she left behind.But before she can choose, a crisis forces the two worlds together, and Amy must stare down a future where she could lose both sides of herself, and every dream she’s ever nurtured, in the beat of a heart.

    Ike has never had a lease, just a handshake agreement with the recently deceased landlord; and now that landlord’s son stands to make a killing on apartment 2B.Centering on the fate of one apartment before, during, and after the height of New York’s real estate boom, Ellington Boulevard’s characters include the Tenant and His Dog; the Landlord, a recovered alcoholic and womanizer who has newly found Judaism and a wife half his age; the Broker, an out-of-work actor whose new profession finally allows him to afford theater tickets he has no time to use; the Broker’s New Boyfriend, a second-rate actor who composes a musical about the sale of 2B (“Is there no one I can lien on if this boom goes bust?”). There’s also the Buyer, a trusting young editor at a dying cultural magazine, who falls in love with the Tenant; the Buyer’s Husband, a disaffected graduate student taken to writing bawdy faux-academic papers; and the Buyer’s Husband’s Girlfriend, a children’s book writer with a tragic past.With the humor and poignancy that made Langer’s first novel, Crossing California, a favorite book of the year among critics across the country, Ellington Boulevard is an ode to New York. It’s the story of why people come to a city they can’t afford, take jobs they despise, sacrifice love, find love, and eventually become the people they never thought they’d be—for better and for worse.

    From the day it was erected, it has been the object of obsession for the heads of empires, conjuring their most hidden vices. In a riveting chronicle of betrayal, revenge, family rivalry, and raw greed, award-winning journalist Mitchell Pacelle tells the compelling tale of the history of the Empire State Building and the battle for ownership which reveals the inner workings of a world of powerful, self-made men. Pacelle brings to life the colorful cast of characters involved-a dramatis personae including the most powerful players in the international real estate markets both old and new, including John Raskob and Pierre du Pont alongside Donald Trump, the Helmsleys, Peter Malkin, and the eccentric Japanese billionaire Hideki Yokoi. Before the tale is over, Yokoi will accuse his beloved illegitimate daughter of stealing the building from him, several participants will land in jail, one will die suddenly, and a tense legal standoff will leave the landmark in limbo. One of the most fascinating characters to emerge from this richly layered story is the building itself, with its legendary romances and suicides, its odd tenants, and the countless human triumphs and tragedies that have been played out within its towering walls.