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Original Essays | September 23, 2009

Jonathan Lethem: IMG Stops: On Those Things My New Novel Forgot to Be About, Maybe



For me, there's a weird, unfathomable gulf — I almost wrote gulp — between the completion of a novel and its publication. Some days this duration feels interminable, as though the book has... Continue »
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    Chronic City

    Jonathan Lethem

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- Local Warehouse Crime- True Crime

Ghosty Men: The Strange But True Story of the Collyer Brothers, New York's Greatest Hoarders: An Urban Historical

by Franz Lidz

Ghosty Men: The Strange But True Story of the Collyer Brothers, New York's Greatest Hoarders: An Urban Historical Cover

Synopses & Reviews

Publisher Comments:

A true tale of changing New York by Franz Lidz, whose Unstrung Heroes is a classic of hoarder lore.

Homer and Langley Collyer moved into their handsome brownstone in white, upper-class Harlem in 1909. By 1947, however, when the fire department had to carry Homer's body out of the house he hadn't left in twenty years, the neighborhood had degentrified, and their house was a fortress of junk: in an attempt to preserve the past, Homer and Langley held on to everything they touched.

The scandal of Homer's discovery, the story of his life, and the search for Langley, who was missing at the time, rocked the city; the story was on the front page of every newspaper for weeks. A quintessential New York story of quintessential New York characters.

About the Author

Franz Lidz is a Sports Illustrated senior writer, a New York Times film essayist, and the author of Unstrung Heroes: My Improbable Life with Four Impossible Uncles, which was made into a 1995 Disney feature film.

What Our Readers Are Saying

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Average customer rating based on 1 comment:
bookends, April 19, 2007 (view all comments by bookends)
A true story of two brothers who were packrats to the extreme. So much junk was jammed into their brownstone that they had to tunnel through the mess. Only in New York could this make the front page of all the papers.
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Product Details

ISBN:
9781582343112
Subtitle:
The Strange But True Story of the Collyer Brothers, New York's Greatest Hoarders: An Urban Historical
Author:
Lidz, Franz
Publisher:
Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
Location:
New York
Subject:
General
Subject:
New york (state)
Subject:
New York
Subject:
Eccentrics and eccentricities
Subject:
United States - 20th Century (1900-1945)
Subject:
United States - State & Local - General
Subject:
General History
Subject:
Murder - General
Subject:
New york (n.y.)
Edition Number:
1st U.S. ed.
Edition Description:
Us
Series Volume:
108-203
Publication Date:
October 2003
Binding:
Hardcover
Language:
English
Pages:
161
Dimensions:
746x556x73 61

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