Editorial Ass's Top 3 Books about New York

1) A TREE GROWS IN BROOKLYN, by Betty Smith
Francie Nolan is a quiet, nerdy, impoverished daughter of an alcoholic club singer father and a hard-as-nails mother in World War I era Brooklyn.

Sorry, guys, was this a cop-out? I LOVE this book. It's one of the few books I read again and again and never feel guilty about.

2) THIS SIDE OF BRIGHTNESS, by Colum McCann
The side-by-side stories of Treefrog, a contemporary "mole" living in the subway tunnels under Manhattan, and Nathan Walker, a tunnel digger who, almost a century earlier, lost his best friend during the creation of those same tunnels.

This is one of those books that I read a bunch of years ago and felt lukewarm about at the time, but which has really affected me in the longterm--I still have very vivid images from the book periodically, especially when I'm riding the subway. McCann makes you think about race, class, what goes into building our city, and what people have given up so we can run.

3) INVISIBLE MAN, by Ralph Ellison
A Southern black man makes his way north through a series of oppressive obstacles. He ends up in New York, the city where everyone's invisible (although that's not the point of the book, exactly). This only makes it to #3 because only part of the book takes place in New York. However, I can't think of another novel that depicts early 20th century Harlem as powerfully.

Runner-up: WINTER'S TALE, by Mark Helprin
Peter Lake, a street roughian who fell in love with a newspaper owner's tubercular daughter at the turn of the 20th century, is pursued into the mist by gangsters. He and the white horse he is riding emerge almost one hundred years later, in Helprin's imagined turn of the millennium (the book was published in 1983). An urban fantasy epic. It has only lost a little power for having dated itself.

[Look at how I limited myself to 3!!!]