literary
brooklyn
The Writers of Brooklyn and the Story of American City Life (Henry Holt, 2011)
For the first time, here is Brooklyn's story through the eyes of its greatest storytellers.
Like Paris in the twenties or postwar Greenwich Village, Brooklyn today is experiencing an extraordinary cultural boom. In recent years, writers of all stripes—from Jhumpa Lahiri, Jennifer Egan, and Colson Whitehead to Nicole Krauss and Jonathan Safran Foer—have flocked to its patchwork of distinctive neighborhoods. But as literary critic and journalist Evan Hughes reveals, the rich literary life now flourishing in Brooklyn is part of a larger, fascinating history. With a dynamic mix of literary biography and urban history, Hughes takes us on a tour of Brooklyn past and present and reveals that hiding in Walt Whitman's Fort Greene Park, Hart Crane's Brooklyn Bridge, the raw Williamsburg of Henry Miller's youth, Truman Capote's famed house on Willow Street, and the contested streets of Jonathan Lethem's Boerum Hill is the story of more than a century of life in America's cities.
Literary Brooklyn is a prismatic investigation into a rich literary inheritance, but most of all it's a deep look into the beloved borough, a place as diverse and captivating as the people who walk its streets and write its stories.
PRAISE FOR LITERARY BROOKLYN
“Lively...Urban history and literary history often brush up against each other to profound effect.”
— The New York Times Book Review
“Smart… [Hughes] has perceptive things to say about Brooklyn’s tangled relationship to American lit. He traces the way writers have absorbed Brooklyn’s scruffy, somewhat persecuted mindset… his book becomes a pleasure-delivery system.”
— The New York Times
“The rich history of literary life in ‘America’s first suburb’ is very enjoyably explored... Hughes is good at forging connections between the many Brooklyn authors whose stories he tells...even as he gives the arcs of their careers fresh context by setting them against the dramatic ups and downs of the borough they all called home.”
— The Christian Science Monitor
“Highbrow and Brilliant”
— New York Magazine's Approval Matrix
“If you’ve ever lived in Brooklyn, this book will make you see your experience in an entirely different and mythic light. And if you’re thinking about moving to Brooklyn, this book will make it hard not to rent the U-Haul. Evan Hughes has written an incredibly engaging and thoughtful history of how Brooklyn became the heart of America’s most literary city. I stayed up way too late getting to the last page.”
— Tom Bissell, author of Extra Lives and The Father of All Things
“Literary Brooklyn is immensely readable, hugely informative, and thoroughly enjoyable. Once here, you won’t want to leave.”
“A hybrid of urban history and literary biography and analysis, this engrossing, perceptive book makes a valid case for the richness of Brooklyn as a site of the literary imagination.”
“Wonderfully illuminating... Hughes charts this tumultuous, two-century urban history through the lives and works of important writers who, for their own reasons and for a time at least, called Brooklyn home. Elegantly, the author slides in and out of eras, identifying the sometimes surprising geographical and spiritual connections among an impressive list of writers... Whether they used it as subject, setting, or inspiration, saw it as a refuge, hideout or merely as a patch of relative green convenient to Manhattan, these writers are part of a rich artistic procession Hughes brings vividly to life.”
— Kirkus Reviews
“A well-researched urban history book and a comprehensive literary biography that brims with fresh insights.”
— Booklist