meni najbolje knjige o new yorku
Ovu listu sam već dugo vrijeme dužna. Znam da nije potpuna i mislim da ću je upotpunjavati do kraja života. No, bolje ju je objaviti nepotpunu, nego je ne objaviti uopće.
Kriteriji? Knjige u kojima je New York više nego samo mjesto radnje. New York je u njima protagonist. Opisi su editorial reviews. Redoslijed, abecednim redom prema autoru.
 |
Auster, Paul: The New York Trilogy U akademskoj karijeri sam imala čast biti u njegovoj grupi na fakultetu. U prosincu je izdao novu knjigu, o Brooklynu, koja je definitvno na mojoj listi za čitanje u najskorijoj budućnosti. City of Glass, Ghosts, and The Locked Room, The New York Trilogy are novels of desire: the desire to write a detective novel, to read one, to inhabit it. . . By turning the mystery novel inside out, Auster may have initiated a whole new round of storytelling. |
 |
Bushnell, Candace: Sex and the City Zabavan, iako meni nerealan, ovo je život nekih žena na Manhattanu u 90ima. Morala sam je staviti na listu, jer ipak je moj zivot ’scenarij za nove epizode’. Samo se nadam sa ne budu radili seriju iz toga jer bude otkazana nakon pilot epizode. “Uzbudljiva večer za mene: dijete sam stavila spavati i do pola noći prevodim tekstove za agenciju u Belgiji. Pitam se: kako se kaže thumbnail na hrvatskom?” A comically sordid look at status and ambition and the many characters consumed by the sexual politics of the ’90s. |
 |
Capote, Truman: Breakfast at Tiffany’s Knjiga (i film) zbog koje i danas u draguljarnici dobiju zahtjeve za stol za doručak. (Pročitano negdje, ne znam kad i ne znam gdje.) The popular story of Holly Golightly–”a cross between Lolita and Auntie Mame”. |
 |
Gourevitch, Philip: A Cold Case Još jedan pisac u čijoj sam grupi Journalism and Literary Imagination imala čast i veselje biti na fakultetu. Nakon nekoliko godina u tjedniku The New Yorker preuzeo je uredništvo prestižne The Paris Review. Frank Koehler was only 15 when he shot a friend in the back for double-crossing him. That’s the sort of guy he was–violent, Mob-connected, and remorse-free. In the same rough-and-tumble postwar neighborhood on Manhattan’s West Side lived a very different young man: Andy Rosenzweig, rigorously straight and determined to become a policeman at a time when cops were more likely to be taking naps or bribes than nabbing criminals. Years later, in 1970, Koehler murdered two men after an argument in a restaurant. One of the victims was a friend of Rosenzweig’s. It was a straightforward case, but in a typical show of the NYPD’s ineptitude, the case was closed when someone decided to declare Koehler dead, allowing him to slip away. |
 |
Fitzgerald, F. Scott: The Great Gatsby Iako ih je u knjizi preimenovao, Fitzgerald piše o sjevernoj obali Long Islanda. Nije NYC, ali ipak… Self-made, self-invented millionaire Jay Gatsby embodies some of Fitzgerald’s–and his country’s–most abiding obsessions: money, ambition, greed, and the promise of new beginnings. Gatsby’s rise to glory and eventual fall from grace becomes a kind of cautionary tale about the American Dream. |
 |
James, Henry: Washington Square Šteta da je NYU u potpunosti okupirao kvart u kojem se događa cijela ova priča. James’s astute story of a plain heiress and the poor, handsome suitor who may or may not love her only for her wealth. |
 |
Lewis, Michael: Liar’s Poker Ovo bi mogla biti priča o svakom brokeru prije sloma burze 1987. As described by Lewis, liar’s poker is a game played in idle moments by workers on Wall Street, the objective of which is to reward trickery and deceit. With this as a metaphor, Lewis describes his four years with the Wall Street firm Salomon Brothers, from his bizarre hiring through the training program to his years as a successful bond trader. Lewis illustrates how economic decisions made at the national level changed securities markets and made bonds the most lucrative game on the Street. His description of the firm’s personalities and of the events from 1984 through the crash of October 1987 are vivid and memorable. |
 |
McCourt, Frank: Angela’s Ashes Depresivno i istovremeno inspirirajuće. Nedavno mu je izašao treći memoar, o karijeri kao učitelj u NYC školi. The pinnacle of the miserable Irish Catholic childhood. Born in Brooklyn in 1930 to recent Irish immigrants Malachy and Angela McCourt, Frank grew up in Limerick after his parents returned to Ireland because of poor prospects in America. It turns out that prospects weren’t so great back in the old country either–not with Malachy for a father. A chronically unemployed and nearly unemployable alcoholic, he appears to be the model on which many of our more insulting cliches about drunken Irish manhood are based. Mix in abject poverty and frequent death and illness and you have all the makings of a truly difficult early life. |
 |
Shorto, Russell: The Island at the Center of the World Povijest New Yorka iz 17. stoljeća, kao nizozemske kolonije. Drawing on 17th-century Dutch records of New Netherland and its capital, Manhattan, translated by scholar Charles Gehring only in recent decades, Shorto (Gospel Truth) brings to exuberant life the human drama behind the skimpy legend starting with the colony’s founding in 1623. Most Americans know little about Dutch Manhattan beyond its first director, Peter Minuit, who made the infamous $24 deal with the Indians, and Peter Stuyvesant, the stern governor who lost the island to the English in 1664. These two seminal figures receive their due here, along with a huge cast of equally fascinating characters. But Shorto has a more ambitious agenda: to argue for the huge debt Americans owe to the culture of Dutch Manhattan, the first place in the New World where men and women of different races and creeds lived in relative harmony. |
 |
Wharton, Edith: The House of Mirth Jedno jako drugačije vrijeme u gradu. Opisi NYC s kraja 19. stoljeća su zanimljivi za čitati (npr. parafraziram, na sjeveru u divljini kod Central Parka…) New York at the turn of the century was a time of opulence and frivolity for those who could afford it. But for those who couldn’t and yet wanted desperately to keep up with the whirlwind, like Wharton’s charming Lily Bart, it was something else altogether: a gilded cage rather than the Gilded Age. |
 |
Wharton, Edith: The Age of Innocence OK, volim Edith. Što mogu? A story of the upper classes of Old New York, and Newland Archer’s impossible love for the disgraced Countess Olenska, is a perfectly wrought book about an era when upper-class culture in this country was still a mixture of American and European extracts, and when “society” had rules as rigid as any in history. |
 |
Wolfe, Tom: The Bonfire of the Vanities Priznajem, prvo sam gledala film. Nešto sasvim drugačije. Treba pročitati knjigu. Sherman McCoy, a farcically arrogant investment banker (dubbed a “Master of the Universe,” Wolfe’s brilliant metaphorical co-opting of a then-important toy for boys), hits a black guy in the Bronx with his Mercedes and runs–right into a nightmare peopled by vicious mistresses, thin wives like “social x-rays,” slime-bag politicos, tabloid hacks, and Dantesque denizens of the “justice” system. |
