Abstract

The novelist Colson Whitehead re-creates the exuberance, the chaos, the promise, and the heartbreak of New York. In this portrait of the greatest of cities, Colson Whitehead conveys with immediacy the feelings and thoughts of longtime residents and of newcomers who dream of making it their home. His style, a series of vignettes, meditations, and personal memories, is as multi-layered and multifarious as New York itself. There is a funny, knowing riff on what it feels like to arrive there for the first time; a lyrical meditation on how the city is transformed by an unexpected rain shower; while another captures those magical moments when the city seems to be talking directly to you, inviting you to become one with its rhythms.