…the peaceful urban idyll of Corinne Demas…” — The New York Observer
“…evokes a girl’s coming of age in New York City’s planned ‘utopian’ community.” — Publishers Weekly
“She writes with affection and humor about her years at 524 East 20th Street and her family, friends and neighbors.” — Peter Cooper Village/ Stuyvesant Town News
“This is an irresistible memoir. The book swarms with the sort of everyday detail that not only makes a life memorable but that asks the reader to savor rather than reject it. I smiled on every page.” — Anne Bernays, author of Professor Romeo
“Combines a startling immediacy of presentation with the inevitable distancing of retrospection....Eleven Stories High is richly layered, fondly written, and true in the necessary way of art.” — Sven Birkerts, author of Readings
“Corinne Demas is a wonderful storyteller, and her ability to render anecdotes about times and places gone by—to conjure up the tastes and smells and details of a vanished world—is quite remarkable. She has managed to give us a piece of urban history set within the framework of her own family history. She has also given us a stunningly detailed portrait of a most specific urban culture within a narrative that is itself a compelling story of one young woman’s coming of age.” — Jay Neugeboren, author of Imagining Robert: My Brother, Madness, and Survival: A Memoir
“Demas has found a perfect way to divide up her ostensible subjects—elevators, stores, games, school—to give us a very precise picture of her life in a vertical neighborhood, yet each opens out, by virtue of the author’s ingeniousness and candidness, into a much larger consideration of family, community, city. At the same time, she brings her family to us with remarkable clarity. This is a sociologically dead-on representation of mid-century urban life that is neither Leave it to Beaver nor Ozzie and Harriet in its simplifications nor Manchild in the Promised Land in its accusatory grimness.” — Rosellen Brown, author of Before and After
“Corinne Demas’s Eleven Stories High is a remarkable portrait of a vanished world but not a vanished place. The social history it captures is important, presenting the story of a transitional generation of women, suspended between the quietism of the American Dream of the post-war era of the 1950s and the tumultuous upheavals to come at the end of the sixties. A vivid and paradoxical picture of both the urban American and domestic life once lived, captured by a writer of lyric strengths and fastidious intellect.” — William O’Rourke, author of Signs of the Literary Times: Essays, Reviews, Profiles 1970–1992
“A marvelous memoir. I loved every word...Stuyvesant Town, with its unexpected charm, is as strong a character as any I’ve encountered in personal narrative. Demas’s portrait of her mother is exquisite.” — Anita Shreve, author of The Pilot’s Wife
“Eleven Stories High is a marvelously sensible, observant, honest, and often amusing portrait of a very particular place that manages at the same time to conjure the experiences of many contented children growing up in many kinds of places.” — Rosellen Brown, author of Before and After
“A very meticulous writer, steady and believable. Her powers of recall are extraordinary. I regard this as an important record of contemporary life, as well as a most interesting coming-of-age memoir.” — Shirley Abbott, author of Womenfolks: Growing Up Down South
