New York City: Fiction
Martin Amis Money (Penguin/Viking Penguin). Following the wayward movements of degenerate film director John Self between London and New York, a weirdly scatological novel that's a striking evocation of 1980s excess.James Baldwin Another Country (Penguin/ Vintage). Baldwin's best-known novel, tracking the feverish search for meaningful relationships among a group of 1960s New York bohemians. The so-called liberated era in the city has never been more vividly documented - nor its knee-jerk racism.
Truman Capote Breakfast at Tiffany's (Penguin/Random House). Far sadder and racier than the movie, this novel is a rhapsody to New York in the early 1940s, tracking the dissolute youthful residents of an uptown apartment building and their movements about town.
Chester Himes The Crazy Kill (Canongate Pub Ltd). Himes wrote violent, fast-moving and funny thrillers set in Harlem; this and Cotton Goes to Harlem are among the best.
Henry James Washington Square (Penguin/Viking Penguin). Skillful and engrossing examination of the mores and strict social expectations of New York genteel society in the late nineteenth century.
Joyce Johnson Minor Characters (Penguin). Women were never a prominent feature of the Beat generation; its literature examined a male world through strictly male eyes. This book, written by the woman who lived for a short time with Jack Kerouac, redresses the balance superbly; there's no better novel on the Beats in New York.
Jay McInerney Bright Lights, Big City (Flamingo/Vintage). A trendy, "voice of a generation" book when it came out in the 1980s, it follows a struggling New York writer in his job as a fact-checker at an literary magazine, and from one cocaine-sozzled nightclub to another. Amusing now, as it vividly captures the times.
Henry Miller Crazy Cock (HarperCollins/Grove Weidenfeld, o/p). Semiautobiographical work of love, sex and angst in Greenwich Village in the 1920s. The more easily available trilogy of Sexus, Plexus and Nexus (HarperCollins/Grove) and the famous Tropics duo ( …of Cancer, …of Capricorn ) contain generous slices of 1920s Manhattan sandwiched between the bohemian life in 1930s Paris.
Dorothy Parker Complete Stories (Penguin). Parker's stories are, at times, surprisingly moving. She depicts New York in all its glories, excesses and pretensions with perfect, searing wit. "The Lovely Leave" and "The Game," which focus, as many of the stories do, on the lives of women, are especially worthwhile.
Damon Runyon First to Last and On Broadway (Penguin); also Guys and Dolls (River City). Collections of short stories drawn from the chatter of Lindy's Bar on Broadway and since made into the successful musical Guys 'n' Dolls .
J.D. Salinger The Catcher in the Rye (Penguin/Bantam). Salinger's gripping novel of adolescence, following Holden Caulfield's sardonic journey of discovery through the streets of New York. A classic.
Hubert Selby Jr. Last Exit to Brooklyn (Paladin/Grove Weidenfeld). When first published in Britain in 1966 this novel was tried on charges of obscenity and even now it's a disturbing read, evoking the sex, the immorality, the drugs and the violence of downtown Brooklyn in the 1960s with fearsome clarity. An important book, but to use the words of David Shepherd at the obscenity trial, you will not be unscathed.
Betty Smith A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (Pan/HarperCollins). Something of a classic, and rightly so, in which a courageous Irish girl learns about family, life and sex against a vivid prewar Brooklyn backdrop. Totally absorbing.
Edith Wharton Old New York (Virago/Scribners). A collection of short novels on the manners and mores of New York in the mid-nineteenth century, written with Jamesian clarity and precision. Virago/Scribner also publish her Hudson River Bracketed and The Mother's Recompense , both of which center around the lives of women in nineteenth-century New York.
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