Gone to New York Adventures in the City

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. Ian Frazier is the author of Great Plains , The Fish '' s Eye , On the Rez , Family , as well as Coyote v. Acme and Dating Your Mom . A frequent contributor to The New Yorker , he lives in Montclair, New Jersey. 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 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 evocations of the F train, Canal Street, and Prospect Park, Brooklyn, and in his "Bags in Trees" essay, Frazier gives us New York again, in all its vital and human multiplicity. "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 "[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 "Generous slices of New York wry, from humorist/essayist Frazier. Though currently a New Jersey suburbanite, Frazier resided for years in lower Manhattan and Brooklyn. In these 22 pieces from the Atlantic Monthly , Double Take , Mother Jones , Outside and The New Yorker , the native of Hudson, Ohio, celebrates Gotham as only a wide-eyed transplant could. The essays begin in 1975'”when the city teetered toward bankruptcy'”and end in 2005, when, post-9/11, Frazier wished that city residents would ''remain our hopeful, foolish selves while caught up, now inextricably, in the wider world.'' Like predecessors A.J. Liebling and Joseph Mitchell, he chronicles the manically funny. More often, he rejoices in the infinite idiosyncrasies encouraged by the city. Three essays describe his hobby of snagging bags out of trees'”a penchant so pronounced that his wife grew skeptical when he began bringing some bags home. In marvelous detail, he profiles George Wittig, who climbed the World Trade Center in 1977, as well as an octogenarian master of the lost art of manual-typewriter repair. Frazier even strings together graffiti in a reading room at Columbia University''s Butler Library into a hilarious casual essay. He is equally at home delivering a Whitmanesque hosanna to Brooklyn, a dissection of the groups riding the F Train and a chronicle of Canal Street, jammed with as much sound, character, incident and history as the colorful neighborhood itself. A vivid collection of essays expertly blending

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.