Malcom Burgess, publisher of Oxygen Books' City-lit series, selects his favourite reads for the Big Apple
Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, 1943
This New York classic about a young girl growing up is a superb evocation of Brooklyn and the immigrant experience.
"Johnny took Francie up on the roof. She saw a whole new world. Not far away was the lovely span of the Williamsburg Bridge. Across the East River, like a fairy city made of silver cardboard, the skyscrapers loomed cleanly."
? Around Meserole Ave and Manhattan Ave, Williamsburg
Suze Rotolo, A Freewheelin' Time, 2008
Suze Rotolo's memoir of her early 1960s life with Bob Dylan and the extraordinary period of artistic and political ferment in Greenwich Village.
"Greenwich Village ? with its bohemian tradition overtaken by the hep cats of jazz and the beats and subsequently the hip folk crowd, which evolved into the hippie culture with a psychedelic soundtrack ? had become the place to be."
? West 4th Street, Greenwich Village
Marshall Berman, On the Town, 2006
A thrilling illustrated tour of "the crossroads of the world" captures 100 years of spectacle, both mythic and real.
"Ever since the opening of the Times Tower and the IRT subway a century ago, in the winter of 1904-05, Times Square has been a remarkable environment. With its huge crowds, multiple banks of lights, layers of enormous signs, this place has been exceptional ?"
? Times Square
Henry James, Washington Square, 1880
No one evokes the world of patrician Old New York better than Henry James in this novel, set in the neighbourhood where he was born.
"The ideal of quiet and of genteel retirement, in 1835, was found in Washington Square, where the Doctor built himself a handsome, modern, wide-fronted house, with a big balcony before the drawing-room windows, and a flight of white marble steps ..."
? Washington Square
Philippe Petit, To Reach the Clouds, 2003
Philippe Petit recounts the day in 1974 when he illegally walked across a tightrope between the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center.
"Wire and I together, we voluptuously penetrate the cloudy layer that melts as we approach, as we pass between the twin towers of New York City's World Trade Center. I walk on air that softens under each step. I glide each foot."
? Ground Zero
Toni Morrison, Jazz, 1992
Harlem in the 1920s, the capital of Black America and jazz itself, is the setting for Toni Morrison's dazzling novel.
"Whatever the problems of being winterbound in the City they put up with them because it was worth anything to be on Lenox Avenue safe from fays and the things they think up; where the sidewalks ? are wider than the main roads of the towns where they were born."
? Lenox Avenue, Harlem
Teju Cole, Open City, 2011
Along the streets of Manhattan, a young Nigerian doctor walks and offers a meditation on history and culture, identity and solitude ? a tour-de-force of place that has been compared with W G Sebald.
"Within a few minutes of our entering the Upper Bay, we saw the Statue of Liberty, a faint green in the mist, then very quickly massive and towering over us, a monument worthy of the name, with the thick folds of her dress as stately as columns."
? Statue of Liberty
Joseph Mitchell, The Bottom of the Harbour, 2008
One of America's greatest journalists describes and records the waters of New York and the rivermen who work there.
"I often feel drawn to the Hudson River ? I never get tired of looking at it; it hypnotizes me. I like to look at in midsummer, when it is warm and dirty and drowsy, and I like to look at it in January, when it is carrying ice."
? Hudson River
Jan Morris, Manhattan '45, 1987
When the author landed in New York in 1945 it was like a magical island-city of skyscrapers, optimism and boundless potential.
"Towering islanded on the edge of a continent, facing the wild ocean, Manhattan was as truly romantic a city as Venice itself, and in one way or another the look of it reflected that romance. Except for the old grid of streets ? hardly anything was regular in it."
? New York docks
J D Salinger, Catcher in the Rye, 1951
Salinger's Catcher in the Rye is one of the iconic New York novels; his narrator Holden Caulfield's descriptions of Central Park have a heartbreaking poignancy.
"I was thinking about the lagoon in Central Park, down near Central Park South. I was wondering if it would be frozen over when I got home, and if it was, where did the ducks go? ? where the ducks went when the lagoon got all icy and frozen over. I wondered if some guy came in a truck and took them away to a zoo or something. Or if they just flew away."
? Central Park
Buy Catcher in the Rye at the Guardian Bookshop
? Malcolm Burgess is the publisher of Oxygen Books' City-lit series, featuring some of the best ever writing on favourite world cities, oxygenbooks.co.uk
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/travel/2011/may/17/top-10-books-on-newyork
