The Colossus of New York

Author: Colson Whitehead
Publisher: Anchor
ISBN: 0307428281
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 178

Book Description
In a dazzlingly original work of nonfiction, the two time Pulitzer-Prize winning author of The Underground Railroad and The Nickel Boys recreates the exuberance, the chaos, the promise, and the heartbreak of New York. Here is a literary love song that will entrance anyone who has lived in—or spent time—in the greatest of American cities. A masterful evocation of the city that never sleeps, The Colossus of New York captures the city’s inner and outer landscapes in a series of vignettes, meditations, and personal memories. Colson Whitehead conveys with almost uncanny immediacy the feelings and thoughts of longtime residents and of newcomers who dream of making it their home; of those who have conquered its challenges; and of those who struggle against its cruelties. Whitehead’s style is as multilayered and multifarious as New York itself: Switching from third person, to first person, to second person, he weaves individual voices into a jazzy musical composition that perfectly reflects the way we experience the city. There is a funny, knowing riff on what it feels like to arrive in New York for the first time; a lyrical meditation on how the city is transformed by an unexpected rain shower; and a wry look at the ferocious battle that is commuting. The plaintive notes of the lonely and dispossessed resound in one passage, while another captures those magical moments when the city seems to be talking directly to you, inviting you to become one with its rhythms. The Colossus of New York is a remarkable portrait of life in the big city. Ambitious in scope, gemlike in its details, it is at once an unparalleled tribute to New York and the ideal introduction to one of the most exciting writers working today. Look for Colson Whitehead’s new novel, Crook Manifesto, coming soon!

The Colossus of Maroussi

Author: Henry Miller
Publisher: New Directions Publishing
ISBN: 9780811201094
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 264

Book Description
The author's quest for spiritual renewal is illuminated in descriptions of his impressions of Greece and its people.

The Colossus of Roads

Author: Christina Uss
Publisher: Holiday House
ISBN: 0823444503
Category : Juvenile Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 211

Book Description
From the author of the acclaimed The Adventures of a Girl Called Bicycle comes a tale of traffic jams, secret plans, and one eleven-year-old boy's determination to save his family's livelihood. Rick Rusek's stomach has a lot to say. It's got opinions on tasty foods, not-so-tasty foods, and driving in traffic-jammed Los Angeles makes it roil, boil, gurgle, and howl. It's doing the best it can. It never meant to earn its owner the nickname Carsick Rick or make him change schools for fifth grade. And Rick's stomach isn't the only one dealing with terrible traffic. His family's catering service, Smotch, is teetering on the verge of ruin after a rash of late deliveries and missed appointments. Fortunately, Rick has the solution. Unfortunately, no one wants to listen to a kid. Absolutely certain that he could fix the constant, endless traffic snarls, Rick hatches a plan. But he'll need help from his unicorn-loving Girl Scout neighbor, a famous street artist, and the best driver in L.A. Together they'll take on the stream of stalled cars--and a secret conspiracy or two, too. It's going to be tough, but Rick won't give up. If he can successfully move the 330,000 slow-moving cars standing in the way of his family's future, maybe everyone will see that he's not Carsick Rick. He's one of the seven wonders of Los Angeles. He's the Colossus of Roads.

The New Colossus

Author: Marshall Goldberg
Publisher: Diversion Books
ISBN: 1626812659
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 385

Book Description
Greed. Corruption. Murder. New York in 1880 is a hell of a place to make your living. Nellie Bly arrives at age twenty-four in Manhattan, lacking connections and money, but blessed with an abundance of courage and a skill for reportage. Within ten months she lands two front-page stories on the country’s most widely-read newspaper, Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World. The pugnacious and voluble Pulitzer is so impressed that he assigns her to get to the bottom of a murder that has confounded the police—the untimely death of his friend Emma Lazarus, the controversial poet and activist. Her investigation leads to tense encounters with some of the most powerful and ruthless men of the time, in an era where elected officials are bought and sold, and where greed runs rampant on an unregulated Wall Street. Outgunned and ignoring her contemptuous all-male colleagues, Bly has only two real allies: a doctor who uses scientific techniques to establish criminal behavior, and a theater critic with unlimited access to underground New York. As the pieces fall into place, Bly uncovers layer after layer of corruption, getting closer to a dangerous core—and to the truth.

Aller Retour New York

Author: Henry Miller
Publisher: New Directions Publishing
ISBN: 9780811212267
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 100

Book Description
Aller Retour New York is truly vintage Henry Miller, written during his most creative period, between Tropic of Cancer (1934) and Tropic of Capricorn (1939). Miller always said that his best writing was in his letters, and this unbuttoned missive to his friend Alfred Perlès is not only his longest (nearly 80 pages!) but his best--an exuberant, rambling, episodic, humorous account of his visit to New York in 1935 and return to Europe aboard a Dutch ship. Despite its high repute among Miller devotees, Aller Retour New York has never been easy to find. It was first brought out in Paris in 1935 in a limited edition, and a second edition, "Printed for Private Circulation Only," was issued in the United States ten years later. It is now available in paperback as a Revived Modern Classic, with an introduction by George Wickes that illuminates the people and personal circumstances which inform Aller Retour New York.

Crossing Broadway

Author: Robert W. Snyder
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 0801455170
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 309

Book Description
Robert W. Snyder's Crossing Broadway tells how disparate groups overcame their mutual suspicions to rehabilitate housing, build new schools, restore parks, and work with the police to bring safety to streets racked by crime and fear. It shows how a neighborhood once nicknamed "Frankfurt on the Hudson" for its large population of German Jews became "Quisqueya Heights"—the home of the nation's largest Dominican community. The story of Washington Heights illuminates New York City's long passage from the Great Depression and World War II through the urban crisis to the globalization and economic inequality of the twenty-first century. Washington Heights residents played crucial roles in saving their neighborhood, but its future as a home for working-class and middle-class people is by no means assured. The growing gap between rich and poor in contemporary New York puts new pressure on the Heights as more affluent newcomers move into buildings that once sustained generations of wage earners and the owners of small businesses. Crossing Broadway is based on historical research, reporting, and oral histories. Its narrative is powered by the stories of real people whose lives illuminate what was won and lost in northern Manhattan's journey from the past to the present. A tribute to a great American neighborhood, this book shows how residents learned to cross Broadway—over the decades a boundary that has separated black and white, Jews and Irish, Dominican-born and American-born—and make common cause in pursuit of one of the most precious rights: the right to make a home and build a better life in New York City.

The Intuitionist

Author: Colson Whitehead
Publisher: Anchor
ISBN: 0307819965
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 273

Book Description
This debut novel by the two time Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Underground Railroad and The Nickel Boys wowed critics and readers everywhere and marked the debut of an important American writer. Nominated as one of America’s best-loved novels by PBS’s The Great American Read. It is a time of calamity in a major metropolitan city's Department of Elevator Inspectors, and Lila Mae Watson, the first black female elevator inspector in the history of the department, is at the center of it. There are two warring factions within the department: the Empiricists, who work by the book and dutifully check for striations on the winch cable and such; and the Intuitionists, who are simply able to enter the elevator cab in question, meditate, and intuit any defects. Lila Mae is an Intuitionist and, it just so happens, has the highest accuracy rate in the entire department. But when an elevator in a new city building goes into total freefall on Lila Mae's watch, chaos ensues. It's an election year in the Elevator Guild, and the good-old-boy Empiricists would love nothing more than to assign the blame to an Intuitionist. But Lila Mae is never wrong. The sudden appearance of excerpts from the lost notebooks of Intuitionism's founder, James Fulton, has also caused quite a stir. The notebooks describe Fulton's work on the "black box," a perfect elevator that could reinvent the city as radically as the first passenger elevator did when patented by Elisha Otis in the nineteenth century. When Lila Mae goes underground to investigate the crash, she becomes involved in the search for the portions of the notebooks that are still missing and uncovers a secret that will change her life forever. Look for Colson Whitehead’s new novel, Crook Manifesto, coming soon!

John Henry Days

Author: Colson Whitehead
Publisher: Anchor
ISBN: 0307486672
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 402

Book Description
From the bestselling, two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Underground Railroad and The Nickel Boys, a novel that is "funny and wise and sumptuously written" (Jonathan Franzen, The New York Times Book Review). Colson Whitehead’s triumphant novel is on one level a multifaceted retelling of the story of John Henry, the black steel-driver who died outracing a machine designed to replace him. On another level it’s the story of a disaffected, middle-aged black journalist on a mission to set a record for junketeering who attends the annual John Henry Days festival. It is also a high-velocity thrill ride through the tunnel where American legend gives way to American pop culture, replete with p. r. flacks, stamp collectors, blues men , and turn-of-the-century song pluggers. John Henry Days is an acrobatic, intellectually dazzling, and laugh-out-loud funny book that will be read and talked about for years to come. Look for Colson Whitehead’s new novel, Crook Manifesto, coming soon!

Modern New York

Author: Greg David
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
ISBN: 1137000406
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 318

Book Description
The economic history of New York is filled with high-stakes drama and big figures. In Modern New York, renowned economist and political commentator Greg David tells the story of the metropolis's financial highs and lows since the 1960s. He takes a hard look at how Wall Street came to dominate the economy in the years following the wrenching decade of the Fiscal Crisis and how New York's high finance roller coaster came to affect the entire city and the world. He tackles the major controversies over real estate development, the growth of inequality, the role of immigration and the prospects for diversification. In addition Modern New York profiles the business and political leaders at the forefront of today's economic issues, as well as the average people who benefit from (and are the casualties of) the structure and cycles of this hub's capricious economy. From covert breakfasts with Wall Street heads to profiles of people like the brilliant but complex economic development artist Dan Doctoroff, Modern New York features all sorts of characters with big personalities and big wallets, from Donald Trump to Michael Bloomberg. This book takes readers on a journey to understanding the machinery and people as well as the spirit of New York. With its many great stories and applicability to other metropolises such as London, Singapore, Sydney, or Hong Kong, it will be relevant to readers around the world..

Zone One

Author: Colson Whitehead
Publisher: Anchor
ISBN: 0385535015
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 261

Book Description
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • From the two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Underground Railroad and The Nickel Boys: A pandemic has devastated the planet, sorting humanity into two types: the uninfected and the infected, the living and the living dead. • "One of the best books of the year." —Esquire After the worst of the plague is over, armed forces stationed in Chinatown’s Fort Wonton have successfully reclaimed the island south of Canal Street—aka Zone One. Mark Spitz is a member of one of the three-person civilian sweeper units tasked with clearing lower Manhattan of the remaining feral zombies. Zone One unfolds over three surreal days in which Spitz is occupied with the mundane mission of straggler removal, the rigors of Post-Apocalyptic Stress Disorder (PASD), and the impossible task of coming to terms with a fallen world. And then things start to go terribly wrong… At once a chilling horror story and a literary novel by a contemporary master, Zone One is a dazzling portrait of modern civilization in all its wretched, shambling glory. Look for Colson Whitehead’s new novel, Crook Manifesto, coming soon!