The New York Nobody Knows by William B. Helmreich

As a kid growing up in Manhattan, William Helmreich played a game with his father they called "Last Stop." They would pick a subway line and ride it to its final destination, and explore the neighborhood there. Decades later, Helmreich teaches university courses about New York, and his love for exploring the city is as strong as ever.

Putting his feet to the test, he decided that the only way to truly understand New York was to walk virtually every block of all five boroughs--an astonishing 6,000 miles. His epic journey lasted four years and took him to every corner of Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx, and Staten Island. Helmreich spoke with hundreds of New Yorkers from every part of the globe and from every walk of life, including Mayor Michael Bloomberg and former mayors Rudolph Giuliani, David Dinkins, and Edward Koch. Their stories and his are the subject of this captivating and highly original book.

We meet the Guyanese immigrant who grows beautiful flowers outside his modest Queens residence in order to always remember the homeland he left behind, the Brooklyn-raised grandchild of Italian immigrants who illuminates a window of his brownstone with the family's old neon grocery-store sign, and many, many others. Helmreich draws on firsthand insights to examine essential aspects of urban social life such as ethnicity, gentrification, and the use of space. He finds that to be a New Yorker is to struggle to understand the place and to make a life that is as highly local as it is dynamically cosmopolitan.
What is so fantastic about this book is that the author shows you places in New York that you don't get to read about in any other book. He shows you so many unexpected things that it sometimes is dazzling. Sometimes the chapters are a bit long to keep your attention. The author does a fantastic job in interviewing New York locals and you get to see a great personal picture about how people live and work in the different boroughs and neighbourhoods of NYC. Fascinating book, but you have to take your time for it to read!

Goodbye To All That riters on Loving and Leaving New York, edited by Sari Botton

In 1967, Joan Didion wrote an essay called Goodbye to All That, a work of such candid and penetrating prose that it soon became the gold standard for personal essays. Like no other story before it, Didion’s tale of loving and leaving New York captured the mesmerizing allure Manhattan has always had for writers, poets, and wandering spirits.

In this captivating collection, 28 writers take up Didion’s literary legacy by sharing their own New York stories. Their essays often begin as love stories do, with the passion of something newly discovered—the crush of subway crowds, the streets filled with manic energy, and the sudden, unblinking certainty that this is the only place on Earth where one can become exactly who she is meant to be.They also share the grief that comes like a gut-punch, when the metropolis loses its magic and the pressures of New York’s frenetic life wear thin on even the most fervent dwellers. As friends move away, rents soar, and love—still— remains just out of reach, each writer’s goodbye to New York is singular and universal, like New York itself.

All the stories in the book are all very personal essays written by different authors. They are all unique in their own kind and all very different. But they have one thing in common: New York City.
Every author had their own reason to move to New York, and another reason sometimes to leave it. By these stories the reader get's to know the pretty and shiny side of New York, but also in a few stories, the dark side. The authors share their moments in the city ranging from happy, tragic, and everything in between. it gives a great picture of authors who pursue their writing (or other) career in New York City, but most find out that you don't have to live in NYC specifically to succed as a writer. A beautiful contemporary essay collection that is hard to put down.

365 Guide New York City by Monica DiNatale

Publisher:Hugo House Publishers
Date: August 1st 2013         
Pages: 308
Source: Publisher

You're in New York City. You're hungry. You're thirsty. You don't want to spend a fortune. Now what? Drink. Eat. Save. Every Day of the Year with 365 Guide. The most comprehensive guide to the best restaurant and bar deals anywhere in the city! Compiled by New York Food Host and Deals Expert, Monica DiNatale, you get the inside scoop on where to go at a fraction of the price. Inside 365 Guide there is a deal a day for every day of the year! This is the only New York City guide that tells you where you can find: free, yes, FREE food specials throughout the city, $2-$3 drinks any day of the week, the best happy hours where you can nosh to your stomach's content and more deals than any other guide on the planet!

The book is not the usual tourist kind of travel guide you mostly see, with pictures and such. No, this guide is just aimed to be very practical and to find. All the selections Monica has made are listed from  1 to 365 and from A-Z. You can search by name, neighborhood or the type of restaurant or bar you are looking for.  From five-star restaurants to the best dive bars, Monica DiNatale is your savings guru. Whether you live here, hope to live here, or are visiting, if you want to know all about New York City's restaurants and bars-at a discount-then 365 Guide is the book for you! I just can't wait to go to NYC someday and to use this useful guide!!

 

 

You can find more about the guide on the official site:

www.365guidenyc.com