Ghosts of New York

by Jim Lewis

Overview

*A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR*
“A wondrous novel, with prose that sparkles like certain sidewalks after rain. . . . That’s it, I thought. That’s exactly what it’s like to live in New York.” —New York Times Book Review

Ghosts of New York is a novel in which the laws of time and space have been subtly suspended. It interweaves four strands: a photographer newly returned to the neighborhood where she grew up, after years spent living overseas; a foundling raised on 14th Street; a graduate student, his romantic partner, and his best friend entangled in a set of relationships with far-reaching personal and political repercussions; and a shopkeeper suffering from first love late in life. Mixing prophecy, history, and a hint of speculative fiction, its stories are bound together even as they are propelled into stranger territory. And undergirding it all is a song, which appears, disappears, and then resurfaces.

Ghosts of New York explores complex lives through indelible renderings of settings—a bar, a night market, a recording studio—that alternate between familiar and unsettling. The work of a celebrated novelist and veteran of the art, film, and music scenes in New York and Austin (described as “a rare talent” by the New York Times and “a powerful literary voice” by Jeffrey Eugenides), this novel will immediately absorb readers intrigued by creative people and the places that sustain and challenge them.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781949199963
Publisher:	West Virginia University Press
Publication date:	04/01/2021
Edition description:	1st Edition
Pages:	300
Sales rank:	1,104,718
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.20(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Jim Lewis lives in Austin and is the author of three novels, which have been translated into many languages: Sister, Why the Tree Loves the Ax, and The King Is Dead. He has also written criticism, reportage, and essays for the New York Times, Slate, Rolling Stone, Granta, and others, and he collaborated with Larry Clark on the story for the movie Kids.

Editorial Reviews

04/05/2021

Lewis (The King Is Dead) maps the meanderings of four New Yorkers in this rich if diffuse series of vignettes. In “The New Love,” a drifter named Dominic walks with an older stranger and reflects on the city’s haunting permanence (“No one dies in New York without leaving a phantom behind”). In “The Big Rock Candy Mountain,” Stephanie, a photographer, celebrates her return after spending seven years abroad by taking in the city’s late-night shimmer. Black foster care child Caruso finally finds a place to call home and an attentive audience for his singing voice in “The Lion of Stuyvesant”; and in “Unto Us Lowliest Sometime Sweep,” heartbroken shopkeeper Benny is perched on the edge of the Brooklyn Bridge contemplating suicide. Lewis finds great beauty in his descriptions (“Spindrift blew off the parked cars, swirling upwards and mixing with the down-falling storm”), though the many threads drift and occasionally feel unresolved, particularly the late speculative concept of a half-real, half-mechanical bunny sold by street vendors that acts to spread a deadly flu in “The Winter Market.” While the character-driven sequences are stylishly conceived and nuanced, the fragmented pieces fall short of completing a bigger picture. Readers will find themselves wishing for a little more. (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly

A wondrous novel, with prose that sparkles like certain sidewalks after rain. . . . That’s it, I thought. That’s exactly what it’s like to live in New York.”
New York Times Book Review

“A collection of connected stories that is so imbued with the city in which it’s set that it could not possibly have taken place anywhere else.”
San Francisco Chronicle

“A masterful tapestry created through the interwoven lives of some of New York’s disparate, imperfect, and vulnerable souls, and set against the backdrop of a city that is a character unto itself: chameleonic, contradictory, hallucinatory yet visceral, fiercely wanting yet fiercely self-protective.”
Richard Price, author of Lush Life

“Jim Lewis is one of my favorite writers. He’s an exquisite stylist with an unsparing eye. In Ghosts of New York, he reveals the city to us through both a magnifying glass and a prism, bringing all facets of it into light. A marvelous novel.”
Rabih Alameddine, author of The Angel of History and An Unnecessary Woman

“Jim Lewis sees like a photographer and writes like an avenging angel.”
Sally Mann, author of Hold Still: A Memoir with Photographs

“Ghosts of New York is an intricate cat’s cradle of life trajectories and a beautifully vulnerable work of fiction.”
Jardine Libaire, author of White Fur

“Reads like a striking literary version of the movie My Dinner with Andre. . . . The writing is beautiful, crisp, and keen-eyed.”
Kirkus Reviews

“In Jim Lewis’s wondrous novel Ghosts of New York, encounters among strangers result in unexpected relationships and a montage that celebrates a city of manifold graces. . . . A subtle, dexterous novel.”
Foreword Reviews

“Lewis is a master at painting developed characters captured in various moments in time. . . . The lyrical narration is continuously engaging, especially as the episodic stories begin to interlace.”
Booklist

From the Publisher

2020-12-15
Poignant vignettes of New York City residents ranging over time and space.

In his fourth novel, Lewis turns his lyric attention to the comings and goings of New Yorkers in various time periods. There’s Stephanie, a photographer returning from Europe to her hometown on an artist’s residency who discovers the city’s beauty when everyone is asleep; Caruso, a child overlooked by the foster care system with a singing voice to knock your head off; Benny, contemplating suicide after falling in love later in life and being destroyed by it; and Mike, Bridget, and Johnny, friends, lovers, intertwined humans in a place rife with “evidence of more cities built in the hollows of this one, each nestled inside the others.” This theme—of one reality nesting within another and people being tethered to each other, their specific neighborhoods, and the stories that preceded them—plays throughout the multiple strands, depicting the connections the characters may share with each other, but it’s only the thinnest of filaments. The novel reads like a striking literary version of the movie My Dinner With Andre, each narrator riffing on life and beauty, the joys of the city coupled with the heartbreak of human existence. Speculative elements come into play—ghosts, but also half-mechanical bunnies that pass on an especially ferocious strain of flu—as well as a broken health care system that evokes the 1980s AIDS crisis and today’s pandemic. Line by line, the writing is beautiful, crisp, and keen-eyed. The stories, alas, never add up to more than a series of compellingly rendered mosaic tiles, lacking the sharp trajectory of a short story and the slow-building resolution of a novel.

Readers looking for more than freshly executed moments honoring NYC and its dwellers may be disappointed.

Kirkus Reviews