Chris Knutsen, a senior editor at Vogue who's also worked at GQ, The New Yorker, and Riverhead Books, is the co-editor of Committed: Men Tell Their Stories of Love, Commitment, and Marriage.
Paperback
$16.00
- ISBN-13: 9781594482823
- Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
- Publication date: 01/02/2008
- Pages: 240
- Sales rank: 423,937
- Product dimensions: 5.09(w) x 7.96(h) x 0.63(d)
- Age Range: 18Years
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A tribute to New York City's most literary borough-featuring original nonfiction pieces by today's most celebrated writers.
Of all the urban landscapes in America, perhaps none has so thoroughly infused and nurtured modern literature as Brooklyn. Though its literary history runs deep-Walt Whitman, Truman Capote, and Norman Mailer are just a few of its storied inhabitants-in recent years the borough has seen a growing concentration of bestselling novelists, memoirists, poets, and journalists. It has become what Greenwich Village once was for an earlier generation: a wellspring of inspiration and artistic expression.
Brooklyn Was Mine gives some of today's best writers an opportunity to pay tribute to the borough they love in 20 original essays that draw on past and present to create a mosaic that brilliantly captures the quality and diversity of a unique, literary landscape.
Contributors include: Emily Barton, Susan Choi, Rachel Cline, Philip Dray, Jennifer Egan, Colin Harrison, Joanna Hershon, Jonathan Lethem, Dinaw Mengestu, Elizabeth Gaffney, Lara Vapnyar, Lawrence Osborne, Katie Roiphe, John Burnham Schwartz, Vijay Seshadri, Darcey Steinke, Darin Strauss, Alexandra Styron, Robert Sullivan
With an introduction by Phillip Lopate.
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Brooklyn, like Greenwich Village, is a state of mind. In this upbeat anthology, diverse Brooklynites describe the euphoria and singularity of "the other borough." Contributors include Jennifer Egan, Jonathan Lethem, Phillip Lopate, and Emily Barton. Literate hometown pride.
Library Journal
Place, idea, and contested symbol, as essayist Phillip Lopate allows in his introduction, Brooklyn harbors a new generation of writers, who offer a good variety of essays on places and people they know. Russian emigre Lara Vapnyar recalls the Russian "parody" of Brighton Beach; John Burnham Schwartz brings his father back to no-longer-Jewish Brownsville; Ethiopian-born Dinaw Mengestu revels in polyglot Kensington; and Lawrence Osborne finds commonality between waterfront Red Hook and his former stomping grounds in Bangkok. Several pieces are miniatures-e.g., Emily Barton on her seltzer man-while Colin Harrison is one of a few with a broader canvas, describing how youth baseball has taken him and his son around the borough. There's almost nothing about black and Caribbean Brooklyn and not enough about the borough's ongoing transformation, though gentrification is a recurring theme. Novelist Jonathan Lethem, almost a professional Brooklynite, offers a hybrid piece titled "Ruckus Flatbush," offering sardonic insider wordplay, then reflecting on his role fighting "shockingly bad" redevelopment; Vijay Seshadri, assaying changes in his neighborhood of Carroll Gardens, once mostly Italian and Hispanic, acknowledges "the commonplace but nonetheless sharp recognition that I only began cherishing it when I understood it was disappearing." Walt Whitman, source of the book's title, might agree. For essay collections, especially where New York is of interest.—Norman Oder