The Big Apple's Bestsellers

I have often read New York books before,
Watched the city recreated, walked words' corridors.
All at once am I several stories high!
Thrifty way to the life New York lives.
[sung to the tune "On the Street Where You Live" by Lerner & Loewe]

Non-Stop New York recommends these fine titles focused on New York City.
It's easy to purchase NYC books from this site in association with Amazon.com.
* NYC Gay Book Guide: Click HERE!
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For those of us who live with books, what we read is as much a part of
our personal history as the events we participate in. For each of us certain
fictional scenes burn with a reality equal to the high points in our own
experience. And the writers who created them have a special relation to us;
they are sometimes collaborators in our lives.
Rediscovering their homes, the rooms where they gathered, the things
they saw as they went from place to place, we learn something about
the sources of their experience and, indirectly, ours.
... Over a drink at the Century Club Alfred Kazin told us,
"I can't prove it but I'm sure New York is the single most important factor
in American writing."

-- from Literary New York: A History and Guide
by Susan Edmiston and Linda D. Cirino
[Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1976] --

New York has been making its appearance in literature
years before the first white settlers stepped ashore.
In Literary New York, Edmiston and Cirino insist:
"No other neighborhood in New York, perhaps in the world,
has been the birthplace of more literature than Greenwich Village."

Here are recent bestsellers centered on The Big Apple.

If you thought NYC was "for the birds," okay: you're right.
Central Park happens to be one of the 14 best USA locales for
bird-watching. Join a devoted group of them, "the Regulars,"
who rise at dawn in all seasons to watch for feathered creatures.
Contact: NYC Parks, Recreation & Cultural Affairs:
[212] 360-8222 for Central Park Recreation;
[212] 861-6030 Central Park Zoo, Wildlife & Aviary;
[212] 772-0210 Central Park's Henry Luce Nature Center.

Or read Marie Winn's book about a devoted circle
of NYC early-birds, "the Regulars," and exciting bird-watching
adventures they've had--especially as they observed a rare thing:
the nesting and birthing of baby red-tailed hawks on a ledge in
the Fifth Avenue building that is also home to Mary Tyler Moore.

Red-Tails in Love: A Wildlife Drama in Central Park
by Marie Winn [NY: Pantheon Books, 1998].
List: $24.00 * Amazon.com's Price: $16.80 * Savings: $7.20 (30%)
Hardcover: 304 pgs [N.Y.: Pantheon Books; March 1998]
To order this book: click its title! ISBN: 0679439978

Booklist said this [02/01/98]:
"The greatness of Central Park has another, deeper source:
the very idea that wildlife can exist, even thrive in the middle of NYC."
Winn's opening chapters of her paean to Central Park bird-watching
evokes the paradox of this pursuit in the heart of the nation's largest
city. Writing of the Regulars--the core group of bird-watchers--and
the discovery of a nesting pair of red-tailed hawks, the author
presents the story of five years in the natural life of the park.
By 1992, when the story begins, Central Park had existed
for 119 years but had never hosted nesting hawks. The
intricacies of the pairing, nest building, mate loss, and
re-mating of the hawks lead to the heart of the book:
the fate of a nest located atop a 12th-floor window on one
of Fifth Avenue's exclusive apartment buildings, an area
that's also a home to celebrities [Mary Tyler Moore,
Woody Allen, etc]. This wonderful look at wildlife, and
people's responses to it, will appeal to many.
Appendixes listing bird & butterfly species found
in the park, along with seasonal highlights, add to
the usefulness of a book highly recommended.
Copyright© 1998, American Library Assoc.

Here are other recent bestsellers centered on The Big Apple.
Is there a New York City-related book that belongs on this page?
Send Non-Stop New York details.

Let's Go 98 New York City (Annual)
22 b&w maps, 5 color maps by Jace Clayton (Editor)
List: $14.99 * Amazon.com's Price: $11.99 * Savings: $3.00 (20%)
Paper: 352 pgs [NY: St. Martin's Press, Nov.1997]
To order this book: click its title! ISBN: 0312168985
* NYC's Gay City Guide: Click HERE!

The Mayor of NYC Joke

After a meeting at City Hall, Mayor Giuliani invited a few V.I.P.s to lunch.
To his dismay, his official car had been "bombed" by a flock of pigeons. With
a strictly-enforced dog clean-up law, NYC streets are no longer studded with
mounds of dog doo-doo -- so the mayor figured he might as well get rid of
pigeon crap, too. He posted a large reward payable to anyone who could rid
NYC of all the pigeon crap. After many long interviews with people full of
nutty schemes, the Mayor met a man who offered: "To get rid of all the
pigeon crap in NYC, I'll have to get rid of all the pigeons -- but if I fail,
I'll pay The City of New York one million dollars."

When the mayor agreed, the man opened his briefcase and a pink pigeon
flew out. The mayor thought,"What a dumb idea!" But to his amazement,
all the NYC pigeons were attracted to this pink bird and started following it.
The pink pigeon flew towards Spuyten Duvil, where there's a terrible current
and undertow, and dove in. All of NYC's pigeons followed and drowned,
whereupon the pink pigeon flew back and into the stranger's briefcase.

The mayor applauded, then motioned for the stranger to come closer. "Before
you leave," said the mayor, " I have a question. You got any pink lawyers?"
_____________________
Speaking of surviving in NYC, despite infamous "pigeon rain," check out:

Jackie Mason & Raoul Felder's Survival Guide to New York City
by Jackie Mason, Raoul Felder, Sean Delonas (Illustrator)
List: $16.00 * Amazon's Price: $11.20 * Savings: $4.80 (30%)
Hardcover: 162 pgs [NY: Avon Books, October 1997]
To order this book: click its title! ISBN: 0380974835
Synopsis: The comic legend & courtroom titan duo who had collaborated
on Jackie Mason & Raoul Felder's Guide to New York & Los Angeles Restaurants join forces again to create a helpful, hysterical guide to
The Big Apple, dishing up tidbits Fodor's won't tell you. Illustrations.

Take a tour of "Radical NYC" with an expert tour guide: Bruce Kayton.

Kids Eat New York:
The Essential Guide to Family-Friendly Restaurants in New York City
by Sam Freund, Elizabeth Carpenter
List: $11.95 * Amazon: $9.56 * Savings: $2.39 (20%)
Paper, 350 pgs [Little Bookroom, Aug. 1997]
To order this book: click its title! ISBN: 0964126249

City in Love: The New York Metamorphoses
List: $19.95 * Amazon's Price: $13.97 * Savings: $5.98 (30%)
Hardcover: 164 pages [Fc2/Black Ice Books, November 1996]
To order this book: click its title! ISBN: 157366023X
Small Presses Editor's Recommended Book, 02/01/97:
A first work of fiction by Alex Shakar won 1996 FC2 National Fiction Competition.
Set in a very different NYC in 1 B.C. Welcome to a brilliant new millennium.

From the Brooklyn-based Shakar, a debut collection of stories linked by their
location, a fanciful New York City, and by allusions to Ovid's Metamorphoses.
In ``Maximum Carnage,'' a sad little girl, Roxanne, becomes a superhero who
saves the day at her brutal playground. The author is wonderfully on-key with
Roxanne's voice (and he knows all about comic books).
In ``The Sky Inside,'' a jumbled, jangly novella, a tough police detective tellingly
comments on the decadence of the city, a sculptor leaves behind gigantic
letters of the alphabet in some cryptic message, and a down-to-earth
astrologer, Mme Merski, calculates when best to give birth. She attracts both
the right and wrong men a few hours apart and conceives twins, one of whom
is a superhero, having been conceived during a particular alignment of the stars.
This is Madame's gift to the city: a hero to save an increasingly endangered
place mere mortal can't understand. In the sentimental ``A Million Years
From Now,'' a deranged old scavenger constructs his ideal woman
out of wire and a fish skeleton; he's still talking to her as emergency
workers bear him away. ``City in Love'' concerns a self-absorbed,
self-conscious writer living with a woman who has a wonderful idea
for a children's story--better, in fact, than the story actually before
the reader, which has as its chief virtue a celebration of the sights
and sounds of New York. ... [A]ll of these pieces are infatuated with
NYC. ... Shakar's exuberantly in love with the vastness, diversity, and
mythic qualities of Manhattan ... a promising talent.
Copyright ©1996 -- excerpt from Kirkus Associates

* NYC Gay Bestseller Guide: Click HERE!

Lost Love: A True Story of Passion, Murder & Justice in Old New York
by George Cooper [Illustrated, 272 pages, Pantheon Books, $23]
List: $12.00 * Amazon: $9.60 * Savings: $2.40 (20%)
Reprint Edition * Paper [NY: Vintage Books, February 1995]
To order this book: click its title! ISBN: 067975699X
The narrative form that George Cooper employs in "Lost Love" is as
unusual as the lively story he creates with authority about one of the
most sensational courtroom trials in post-Civil War America.
The book resembles historical fiction but it is indisputable historical
fact, using the voices of the past in such a way that it reads like a novel.
... What Mr. Cooper achieves in "Lost Love" might be called "novel
nonfiction" because the book's vivid personalities become the basis
of a near-operatic, true-life tale. Interposing his own narration only
where necessary, he seamlessly weaves together letters, dispatches,
court testimony, news accounts. ... The story goes beyond a case of
the subtitle's "passion, murder and justice in old New York."
Mr. Cooper, a former law professor at Columbia University,
describes the details of the trial with keen awareness
of the parallels to modern criminal cases.
-- excerpt from the review by Herbert Mitgang
Copyright 1994 The New York Times

Here's another recent bestseller written about or set inside The Big Apple.
If there's a New York City-related book that belongs on this page,
please send Non-Stop New York details about it.

The Gay Metropolis:
Offering the Cream of a Half-Century of Name-Brand Gay Life & Gossip
by Charles Kaiser

The "Gay Metropolis" of Charles Kaiser's title is less a place than a state of mind.
* NYC Gay Bestseller Guide: Click HERE!

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Time Out N.Y.: Weekly Entertainment Guide Time Out NY@aol.com
Metrobeat's Literary Listings www.metrobeat.com
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