Synopses & Reviews
Welcome to Ian Frazier's New York, a city more downtown than up, where every block is an event, and where the denizens are larger than life. Meet landlord extraordinaire Zvi Hugo Segal, and the man who climbed the World Trade Center, and an eighty-three-year-old typewriter repairman whose shop on Fulton Street has drawers full of umlauts. Learn the location of Manhattan's antipodes, and meander the length of Route 3 to New Jersey.
Like his literary forbears Joseph Mitchell and A.J. Liebling, Frazier, in his bewitching, inimitable voice, makes us fall in love with America's greatest city all over again, the way he did, arriving as a young man from Hudson, Ohio. In classic evocations of the F train, Canal Street, and Prospect Park, Brooklyn, and in his iconic "Bags in Trees" essay, Frazier gives us New York again, in all its vital and human multiplicity.
Review
"America's greatest essayist."--
Los Angeles Times
"These essays are classics of [the] genre. . . . Throughout Frazier writes with such charm, such self-deprecating introspection, we wish that we . . . could claim him as a friend."--The Boston Globe
"One of the best writers in America. Absorbed by people and their stories, endlessly curious, graced with an exquisite ear for the way people speak, addicted to dry humor, and unpretentious, he has become a master craftsman in the odd and lovely art of collecting and telling stories of American life."--The Oregonian
"Frazier has a keen eye for the vagaries of urban life."--Time Out New York
"[A] pleasing, humorous, but also keenly trenchant collection . . . freely mix[es] the ugly with the sublime, and the scary with the fascinating and the funny . . . It's also a lovely read."--The Christian Science Monitor
"A delight to follow on the page . . . And don't let the emphasis on New York City fool you. Frazier is one of us."--Chicago Sun-Times
"This is New York on a human level. Frazier obviously likes people; his empathy comes through."--Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
"The Big Apple never feels so small as when Ian Frazier writes about it."--Continental magazine.
Synopsis
Welcome to Ian Frazier's New York, where every block is an event, and where the denizens are larger than life. Meet landlord extraordinaire Zvi Hugo Segal, and the man who scaled the World Trade Center. Learn the location of Manhattan's antipodes, and meander the length of Route 3 to New Jersey. Like his literary forebears Joseph Mitchell and A. J. Liebling, Frazier makes us fall in love with America's greatest city all over again.
About the Author
Ian Frazier is the author of
Great Plains, On the Rez, and
Dating Your Mom, among other works, all published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. A frequent contributor to
The New Yorker, he lives in Montclair, New Jersey.