Author Picks: 9 Nostalgic NYC Reads Through the Decades

1930s

Part of New York’s charm is the feeling that anything could happen here. Just step out your door and you could meet a movie star, your favorite writer, or the love of your life. A chance encounter sets this stylish novel in motion: in a Greenwich Village jazz club on New Year’s Eve, 1937, Katie Kontent and her roommate, Eve, meet a handsome man in a cashmere coat named Tinker Grey, and suddenly their lives get a lot more glamorous. By turns funny and melancholy, like all the best New York stories, this novel evokes martinis, black-and-white movies, and satin dresses cut on the bias.

1940s

In 1940, after getting kicked out of Vassar, Vivian Morris goes to live with her eccentric Aunt Peg in Manhattan’s Theater District. Aunt Peg taps Vivian to make costumes for the ramshackle theater company she runs, and soon Vivian is learning about showbiz, drinking, sex, and other facts of life from the chorus girls and stage divas who befriend her. What begins as a fizzy tale of sequins, feathers, and gossip columns becomes a frank, bracingly modern story about the real problems and heartaches of New York women.

1950s

This juicy saga follows three young women who work in publishing as they grapple with cads, married men, sexual harassment, unwanted pregnancies, sexism, and heartbreak—as well as success and romance. I identified most with the ambitious Caroline Bender; thirty years after she tackled the slush pile at the fictional Fabian Publications, I became an editorial assistant and found that, in many ways, the job hadn’t changed. A soapy page-turner bubbling with Midtown-at-rush-hour energy and a surprisingly rebellious ending. (Warning: The movie has a different [very conventional and far inferior ending]—read the book instead!)

1960s

Very often, a New York story is an immigrant’s story. Fifteen-year-old Ana Canción’s family pressures her to marry Juan Ruiz and emigrate with him from the Dominican Republic to New York, hoping they’ll eventually be allowed to follow. In the meantime, Ana finds herself alone in a strange country with a gruff man she barely knows, struggling to navigate a new city, a foreign culture, and a difficult marriage. The Upper Manhattan of the mid-1960s comes to life here, from the bodegas and botanicas and dance clubs to the Audubon Ballroom where Malcolm X was shot. Dominican culture still thrives in New York; it’s fascinating to read about its roots in the city, and about the joys, sorrows, and sacrifices of Dominican immigrants as seen through the eyes of a smart, sensitive teenage girl.

1970s

When British rocker Nev Charles chooses her as his musical partner, bold, flamboyant Opal Robinson leaves Detroit to make a splash in New York as singer Opal Jewel. Her first impression of the city is that “everything was so extra—extra hot, extra funky, extra loud.” She records a groundbreaking album while struggling, as a Black woman, with endemic racism and sexism in the rock music scene. Structured as an oral history reported by a journalist with a painful connection to Opal, this novel reads at first like a riveting magazine profile but builds to a stunning ending that reverberates long after you’ve closed the book.

1980s

Famous for its effective second-person narration—“You are not the kind of guy who would be at a place like this at this time in the morning”—BRIGHT LIGHTS, BIG CITY has long been considered the quintessential eighties novel. The narrator, a young man whose fashion-model wife has recently left him, tries to numb his sorrow with constant partying and “Bolivian Marching Powder,” until he loses nearly everything he has. I devoured this book while living on the fringes of the world it depicts—the decadent downtown scene of the 1980s—and wondered whether a life of reckless partying would have different consequences for a young woman than for a man. ASTRID SEES ALL is, in part, my answer to that question.

1990s

Seventeen-year-old Lucy Adler is a street-smart Upper West Sider with a gift for basketball and a crush on her best friend, Percy. The city around her is rapidly changing, reflecting her turmoil and confusion as she explores the meaning of love and her identity as an athlete and as a girl. The New York of the nineties can be heard in her jangly, slangy street talk, inspired by the rhythms of the city: playing pickup games in Riverside Park; sharing joints and secrets on the roof; taking the subway to the prom in a halter dress and strappy sandals; avoiding the hordes in Times Square to spend New Year’s Eve in a diner, just you and your best friend.

2000s

The first half of this novel, “Folly,” starts, like RULES OF CIVILITY, with a serendipitous New York encounter. Alice, an editorial assistant and aspiring writer, meets Ezra, a famous, much older novelist, on a park bench, and they soon begin an affair. (The author had an affair with Philip Roth when she was young, which lends the story a juicy frisson.) Alice is eager to learn whatever she can from Ezra—about writing, about being an artist, and about the romantic pleasures of living in New York. Casting a shadow over the excitement of this lopsided romance is the numbness tangible in post-9/11 New York. The fallout from 9/11 plays a more explicit role in the second half of the book, “Madness,” which follows the interrogation of a Brooklyn-raised Iraqi economist, and which connects to Alice’s story in a surprising and clever way.

2010s

Photographer Bill Hayes moved from San Francisco to New York in 2009 after the death of his partner. He fell in love with the city and, soon after, with the writer and neurologist Oliver Sacks. This poetic memoir evokes the energy and pleasures of Manhattan in fragments—images that catch Bill’s eye as he roams the city, and anecdotes about the people he encounters in his daily life. Reading INSOMNIAC CITY during the pandemic made me long for the days of packed subway cars, sweaty parties, crowded restaurants, and the little interactions at the bodega or the newsstand that we’ve had to avoid this past year. This bittersweet tribute to Oliver Sacks makes a convincing argument that New York City is the best place in the world to fall in love.

The 2020s will surely bring fresh tales of a New York awakening from its pandemic slumber. I can’t wait to read them.

ASTRID SEES ALL comes out on 4/6!

New York, 1984: Twenty-two-year-old Phoebe Hayes is a young woman in search of excitement and adventure. But the recent death of her father has devastated her. With her best friend Carmen, she escapes to the East Village, disappearing into an underworld haunted by artists, It Girls, and lost souls trying to party their pain away. Carmen juggles her junkie-poet boyfriend and a sexy painter while, as Astrid the Star Girl, Phoebe tells fortunes in a nightclub and plots her revenge on Ivan, the older man who painfully wronged her.

When the intoxicating brew of sex, drugs, and self-destruction leads Phoebe to betray her friend, Carmen disappears, and Phoebe begins an unstoppable descent into darkness. She may have a chance to save herself—and Carmen, if she can find her—but to do it she must face what’s hiding in the shadows she’s been running from—within her heart and in the dangerous midnight streets.