Snapshots in Prose

Richard Leonard's Snapshots in Prose is a collector's album of evocative tales about Jamie Lachlan's coming of age in mid-20th-century New York when the city was the world of neighborhood movie palaces and black-and-white television, old people leaning on windowsills above and children playing on streets below, and teenagers sitting on stoops and car fenders, listening to rock and roll on transistor radios.

Growing up on the East Side of Manhattan, Jamie was a daycare runaway and bullied fi...