PRAISE FOR PETE HAMILL:"

Few people have written quite so beautifully about New York as Hamill has in recent years."—Tim Rutten, Los Angeles Times

"With his reporter's eye for detail and a tough-but-tender lyricism, the Brooklyn-bred Hamill brings modern-day New York to life by illuminating its colorful past."—Scott Stephens, Cleveland Plain Dealer

"Hamill sees a world almost gone by. Those who would dismiss that world as nostalgia might consider what in today's NewYork will they have to lovingly evoke years from now."—Sherryl Connelly, New York Daily News

"New York City is the lead actor in the best of Hamill's writing...and it steals the show."—Julie Wittes Schlack, Boston Globe

"Hamill tells a good yarn and has a knack for drawing empathetic portraits of rogues and rule benders....Even a bicycle ride to the store to pick up the Daily News is a good read in Hamill's hands."—Michael Hill, San Francisco Chronicle

"Hamill tells a good yarn and has a knack for drawing empathetic portraits of rogues and rule benders....Even a bicycle ride to the store to pick up the Daily News is a good read in Hamill's hands."

"New York City is the lead actor in the best of Hamill's writing...and it steals the show."

"Hamill sees a world almost gone by. Those who would dismiss that world as nostalgia might consider what in today's NewYork will they have to lovingly evoke years from now."

"With his reporter's eye for detail and a tough-but-tender lyricism, the Brooklyn-bred Hamill brings modern-day New York to life by illuminating its colorful past."

PRAISE FOR PETE HAMILL:

"Few people have written quite so beautifully about New York as Hamill has in recent years."

Little slices of decades-old melancholy from Hamill (Tabloid City, 2011, etc.). This collection of 36 short stories is largely culled from a series called Tales of New York that ran in the New York Daily News in the early '80s. Like most of Hamill's fiction, it's a mix of nostalgia and cynicism. As the author explains in an elegant foreword, this is the world, "without personal computers, cell phones, tweets, digital cameras, or iPads. A world where ‘friend' was not yet a verb." And yet, the stories remain surprisingly timeless, full of regular joes, gangsters, lost souls and the cold, cold rain. There's plenty of nostalgia, remembrances of that awe-inspiring feeling of the world being new, but also the harsh reminders of New York's hard times, not least the wave of heroin and crack that swept the city in that time. From the title story, which finds the neighborhood teens forming a protective circle around a Holocaust survivor who is their age, to "The Book Signing," the tale of an elderly writer returning home, the message is the same. As the writer explains: "I've never really left. Or, to be more exact: those streets have never left me." In addition to that lovely last story, don't miss the other anomaly, "The Men in Black Raincoats," a noir story that feels right at home among its companions in this fine collection. Lost treasures from a time gone by, brimming with affection for old New York.