Hello (And Goodbye) To All That: A Memoir of a Changing New York in the 21st Century

by Jonathan Liebson

Overview

Growing up in suburban Chicago, Jonathan Liebson heard stories about the fabled New York City of his father's childhood: from the World's Fair to Mayor LaGuardia to the family-owned drugstore in Midtown. He eventually makes his own move to the Big Apple—not as a doctor, like his father, but as an aspiring writer and teacher. Soon, he forges his own indelible ties to the city and lives through important historical moments as profound as from his father's time.

Home to some of the country's worst tragedies and upheavals, New York has also been a place of national recovery and inspiration. From the days of Tower Records and The Village Voice through the era of cell phones and bike lanes, Hello (And Goodbye) To All That combines amusing narratives from everyday life in Greenwich Village and Brooklyn with an up-close and personal view of larger transformational events.

Follow the quirky routines of café-goers, surprising encounters with celebrities and writers, and the highs, lows, and dangers of being a New York cyclist. Liebson recounts his experiences witnessing 9/11 from his roof-deck and the city's aftermath, living in a darkened swath of Manhattan after Hurricane Sandy, being one of twenty thousand people to see candidate Barack Obama in Washington Square Park, and teaching uprooted students from the epicenter of the pandemic. Populated with interesting characters, Liebson's memoir presents ironic intersections between the past and present, moments of grace in unexpected places, and a touching intergenerational story of father and son, New York and America, and a common history they all share.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940184470986
Publisher:	Post Hill Press
Publication date:	05/15/2025
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

Jonathan Liebson grew up in suburban Chicago and earned a BA from Wesleyan University, an MA from the University of Kent (UK), and an MF. in fiction from New York University, where he was a fellow in expository writing. He currently lives in New York and teaches courses on writing, literature, and culture at Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts at The New School. He’s taught previously at NYU, Gotham Writers Workshop, College of Charleston, and Miami of Ohio.

Liebson’s writing and reviews have appeared in The Atlantic, The Washington Post, The American Scholar, Tablet Magazine, Time Out NY, and Naming the World: And Other Exercises for the Creative Writer (Random House), and has been selected for the InterAct Theatre Company’s Writing Aloud series, in Philadelphia.