More New York Stories: The Best of the City Section of The New York Times

by Constance Rosenblum

Overview

Fifty more essays from famous writers on their incurable love affair with the Big Apple

What do Francine Prose, Suketu Mehta, and Edwidge Danticat have in common? Each suffers from an incurable love affair with the Big Apple, and each contributed to the canon of writing New York has inspired by way of the New York Times City Section, a part of the paper that once defined Sunday afternoon leisure for the denizens of the five boroughs. Former City Section editor Constance Rosenblum has again culled a diverse cast of voices that brought to vivid life our metropolis through those pages in this follow-up to the publication New York Stories (2005).

The fifty essays in More New York Stories unite the city’s best-known writers to provide a window to the bustle and richness of city life. As with the previous collection, many of the contributors need no introduction, among them Kevin Baker, Laura Shaine Cunningham, Dorothy Gallagher, Colin Harrison, Frances Kiernan, Nathaniel Rich, Jonathan Rosen, Christopher Sorrentino, and Robert Sullivan; they are among the most eloquent observers of our urban life. Others are relative newcomers. But all are voices worth listening to, and the result is a comprehensive and entertaining picture of New York in all its many guises.

The section on “Characters’’ offers a bouquet of indelible profiles. The section on “Places” takes us on journeys to some of the city’s quintessential locales. “Rituals, Rhythms, and Ruminations” seeks to capture the city’s peculiar texture, and the section called “Excavating the Past” offers slices of the city’s endlessly fascinating history.

Delightful for dipping into and a great companion for anyone planning a trip, this collection is both a heart-warming introduction to the human side of New York and a reminder to life-long New Yorkers of the reasons we call the city home.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780814776544
Publisher:	New York University Press
Publication date:	11/24/2010
Pages:	308
Product dimensions:	6.20(w) x 9.10(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Constance Rosenblum, most recently the author of the Habitats column published in the Real Estate section of The New York Times, was a longtime editor of the paper’s City section and a former editor of the Times’s Arts and Leisure section. She is the author of Boulevard of Dreams: Heady Times, Heartbreak, and Hope Along the Grand Concourse in the Bronx.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction
Part One Characters
Part Two Places in the City’s Heart
Part Three Rituals, Rhythms, and Ruminations
Part Four Excavating the Past
About the Contributors
About the Editor

Editorial Reviews

"The City section was an invaluable counterpoint, almost a stowaway, on the cruise liner of the Sunday New York Times. It delivered news that stays newsindelible and intimate stories of city life, by turns disturbing, amusing, and enchanting. The pieces in this collection are as alive now as they were when they first saw newsprint. Reading them again, even across a distance of years, was like bumping into old friends."

Thomas Beller

"New York is the plural city par excellence, the place of many tales. This new collection, taken from the pages of the city paper, gives us a new luxuriance of New York stories, neither neatly splashy nor narrowly sociological, but instead with the spice and eccentricity and plural energy that New Yorkers will recognize as ours and non-New Yorkers may wish was theirs."

Adam Gopnik

For 16 years, local news and quirky, personal stories found a home in the (now defunct) City section of the Sunday New York Times. Former section editor Rosenblum gathers 50 of the best pieces of the post–September 11 era by masters of the form including Edwidge Danticat and Francine Prose. Roy Hoffman's remembrance of a West Village buddy with cerebral palsy who was forced to confine his world to the few blocks he could navigate is complemented by Saki Knafo's tribute to a group of aging amateur athletes who've been playing basketball together for 33 years and David McAninch's appreciative travelogue of the "forgotten" cityscape of lunch counters, taverns, and cigar shops--all odes to a New York less romanticized and more real. Tragedies--like the story of giving a homeless man buried in the city's potter's field a proper family funeral--are squeezed like subway passengers between droller accounts of, say, the weekly lunch ritual of the New Yorker's wry cartoonists. Organized thematically into such categories as "Characters" and "Rituals, Rhythms and Ruminations," this rich sampling delivers. (Nov.)

Publishers Weekly

"Three Hudson valley women contributed outstanding personal essays in this lively collection of urban musings."

Chronogram Magazine

Former section editor Rosenblum gathers 50 of the best pieces of the post–September 11 era by masters of the form including Edwidge Danticat and Francine Prose…this rich sampling delivers.”

-Publishers Weekly

““New York is the plural city par excellence, the place of many tales. This new collection, taken from the pages of the city paper, gives us a new luxuriance of New York stories, neither neatly splashy nor narrowly sociological, but instead with the spice and eccentricity and plural energy that New Yorkers will recognize as ours and non-New Yorkers may wish was theirs.”

-Adam Gopnik,author of Through The Children’s Gate: A Home In New York

From the Publisher

The New York Times printed its last issue of its City Section in May 2009 after 16 years of featuring slices of life in Manhattan and the other four boroughs of New York. Like New York Stories—also edited by the section's former editor, Rosenblum (Boulevard of Dreams: Heady Times, Heartbreak, and Hope Along the Grand Concourse in the Bronx)—this commemorative collection captures the essence of New York's distinctive urban life. Fifty intriguing and heartfelt essays are divided into four sections—"Characters," "Places in the City's Heart," "Rituals, Rhythms, and Ruminations," and "Excavating the Past." The book includes contemporary and historical reflections on the people, places, and spirit of the city. While most of the section's essays were written by Times staffers, this collection also features contributions from well-known authors like Edwidge Danticat, Jonathan Rosen, and Nathaniel Rich. VERDICT For fans of the Big Apple and the New York Times.—Donna Marie Smith, Palm Beach Cty. Lib. Syst., FL

Library Journal