Introduction by James Fenton Illustrated with 102 full-colour photographs, this sumptuous book presents a fascinating peek inside the living rooms of New York's rich and famous. The effect is satisfyingly voyeuristic and the stillness of the living rooms without their inhabitants is both unsettling and thrilling. Among the 70 living rooms featured are those of Elle McPherson, Barbara Taylor Bradford, Louise Bourgeois, Nan Goldin, Norman Mailer, Susan Sontag, Philip Glass, Arthur Schlesinger Jr, Ed Koch, Quentin Crisp and the Rev Al Sharpton.

There's no place like home -- especially the dazzling homes belonging to some of New York's most creative personalities in the arts, and design worlds, as shown in this copiously illustrated volume.

Residences featured here show New York living of the moment: homes that defy traditional definition but which are nevertheless rooted in the historic ground of the city. What does a home look like in twenty-first-century New York? While the city’s name alone brings to mind very specific ideas—the Fifth Avenue penthouse, with its elegant moldings and crystal chandeliers; the SoHo loft, with its bright spaces and air of bohemian ease; the Brooklyn brownstone, with its fireplaces, parquet floors, and lush backyards—the truth is, New York today is much more than this, and the potential for variety in ways of living is, now more than ever, virtually limitless. As a result, in the twenty-first century, the combined design professions enjoy an unprecedented menu of prospective solutions, whether based upon respect for a classically inflected New York past, an emphatic denial of such a tradition, or, most often, some hybrid response that often yields the best innovation possible. New York Living celebrates this vast potential while exploring contemporary apartments and town houses throughout the city, ranging beyond Manhattan into the outer boroughs of Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island, and the Bronx, and back to the center, Manhattan, which continues to climb ever higher in its reach toward the sky.

A single, thirty-year-old woman in the 1970s struggles to find her dream man and dream job in this hilarious & heartwarming classic. Three decades after its original bestselling publication, Sheila Levine is Dead and Living in New York is still completely on target as the most achingly funny book-length suicide note ever written by an agonizingly single thirty-year-old trying unsuccessfully to straddle two worlds: the one she’s been programmed for from birth—marriage first, life later—and the illusive swinging singles scene of liberated New York City. Meet Sheila Levine, she’s smart and funny, and her mother tells her she’s beautiful. . . . But her skirt’s always a bit wrinkled, she’s trying to lose fifteen—make that twenty-five—pounds, she just turned thirty . . . and she’s still single. She tries to date and mate, she really does, but disappointment turns to desperation, and after a flash of insight, Sheila calmly decides to kill herself. So she starts to get her affairs in order and writes a suicide note to her loving parents to explain it all . . . Praise for Sheila Levine is Dead and Living in New York “Sometimes heartbreaking, mostly hilarious, always full of life.” —Newsweek “A book about suicide shouldn’t be this entertaining, but this one is hilarious, due in large part to Sheila’s devil may care attitude and the frankness with which she talks about her life.” —The Bookbag

'Mexican New York' offers an intimate view of globalization as it is lived by Mexican immigrants & their children in New York & in Mexico.

A “lucid, detailed, and imaginative analysis” (The Nation) of the model city that working-class New Yorkers created after World War II—and its tragic demise More than any other city in America, New York in the years after the Second World War carved out an idealistic and equitable path to the future. Largely through the efforts of its working class and the dynamic labor movement it built, New York City became the envied model of liberal America and the scourge of conservatives everywhere: cheap and easy-to-use mass transit, work in small businesses and factories that had good wages and benefits, affordable public housing, and healthcare for all. Working-Class New York is an “engrossing” (Dissent) account of the birth of that ideal and the way it came crashing down. In what Publishers Weekly calls “absorbing and beautifully detailed history,” historian Joshua Freeman shows how the anticommunist purges of the 1950s decimated the ranks of the labor movement and demoralized its idealists, and how the fiscal crisis of the mid-1970s dealt another crushing blow to liberal ideals as the city’s wealthy elite made a frenzied grab for power. A grand work of cultural and social history, Working-Class New York is a moving chronicle of a dream that died but may yet rise again.

A poignant collection of short pieces about the author's hometown, St. Petersburg, Russia, and the siege of Leningrad that combines memoir, history, and fiction. Living Pictures refers to the parlor game of tableaux vivants, in which people dress up in costume to bring scenes from history back to life. It’s a game about survival, in a sense, and what it means to be a survivor is the question that Polina Barskova explores in the scintillating literary amalgam of Living Pictures. Barskova, one of the most admired and controversial figures in a new generation of Russian writers, first made her name as a poet; she is also known as a scholar of the catastrophic siege of Leningrad in World War II. In Living Pictures, Barskova writes with caustic humor and wild invention about traumas past and present, historical and autobiographical, exploring how we cope with experiences that defy comprehension. She writes about her relationships with her adoptive father and her birth father; about sex, wanted and unwanted; about the death of a lover; about Turner and Picasso; and, in the final piece, she mines the historical record in a chamber drama about two lovers sheltering in the Hermitage Museum during the siege of Leningrad who slowly, operatically, hopelessly, stage their own deaths. Living Pictures introduces a startlingly daring and original new voice from world literature.