Synopses & Reviews
A collection of essays—historical and personal—about the present and future of American citiesEdited by Keith Gessen and Stephen Squibb, City by City is a collection of essays—historical, personal, and somewhere in between—about the present and future of American cities. It sweeps from Gold Rush, Alaska, to Miami, Florida, encompassing cities large and small, growing and failing. These essays look closely at the forces—gentrification, underemployment, politics, culture, and crime—that shape urban life. They also tell the stories of citizens whose fortunes have risen or fallen with those of the cities they call home.
A cross between Hunter S. Thompson, Studs Terkel, and the Great Depression-era WPA guides to each state in the Union, City by City carries this project of American storytelling up to the days of our own Great Recession.
Review
Praise for
n+1“So many good writers have come tumbling out of that small journal in the past few years that its begun to resemble an intellectual clown car.” —Dwight Garner, The New York Times Book Review
“Just when youre thinking youre intellectually alone in the world, something like n+1 falls into your hands.” —Jonathan Franzen
Synopsis
From its first shock waves in 2008, the Great Recession has been reshaping American cities. Detroit collapsed, and the ongoing national rollback in industry has meant the death of factory towns like Greensboro, North Carolina and Reading, Pennsylvania. But the effects of the crash have been far from uniform. The populations of gentrifying cities such as San Francisco and Brooklyn continue to expand, with rents soaring and neighborhood demographics changing overnight. Providence, Rhode Island is experiencing a civic renaissance that disguises lingering corruption in its political system. The two hundred citizens of Whittier, Alaska, have been approached about starring in a reality TV show. And racial profiling by police in cities like Cincinnati, Palm Coast, and Baltimore has set the stage for protests that have swept the nation.
City by City, edited by Keith Gessen and Stephen Squibb, is a collection of essays from a new generation of writers working to document the places they call home. With the specificity of Studs Terkel and the humor of Hunter S. Thompson, they capture the forces-gentrification, underemployment, politics, culture, and crime-that are changing the lives of their neighborhoods, their neighbors, and themselves.
About the Author
Keith Gessen is a founding editor of
n+1 and the author of
All the Sad Young Literary Men, as well as the editor of
Diary of a Very Bad Year: Confessions of an Anonymous Hedge Fund Manager and Kirill Medvedev's
It's No Good: Poems, Essays, Manifestoes.
Stephen Squibb is a graduate student in English at Harvard University. His writing has appeared in
Artforum and
e-flux journal.