Hind, newly arrived in New York with her eight-year-old son, several suitcases of unfinished manuscripts, and hardly any English, finds a room in a Brooklyn teeming with people like her who dream of becoming writers. As she discovers the various corners of her new home, they conjure up parallel memories from her childhood and her small Bedouin village in the Nile Delta: Emilia who sells used shoes at the flea market smells like Zeinab, the old woman who worked for Hind's grandfather; the reflection of her own body as she dances tango awakens the awkwardness of her relationship to that body across the years; the story of Lilette, the Egyptian bourgeoise who has lost her memory, prompts Hind to safeguard her own. Through this kaleidoscopic spectrum of disadvantaged characters we encounter unique but familiar life histories in this award-winning and intensely moving novel of displacement and exile. It was the winner of the Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature, and was shortlisted for the 2011 Arabic Booker prize.

Settled in the 1600s, Brooklyn Heights is one of New York's most historic neighborhoods. Its strategic location overlooking the harbor proved instrumental during the Revolutionary War's Battle of Brooklyn. In the 1830s, steam ferries transformed it into America's first suburb, where abolitionism flourished and one of the largest Civil War Sanitary Fairs was held. Throughout the nineteenth century, wealthy philanthropists and entrepreneurs built high-styled Gothic Revival and Italianate homes and founded many landmark Brooklyn institutions. Though the neighborhood declined with the new century, it became a target of Robert Moses's urban renewal projects in the 1930s. Its designation as the city's first historic district saved Brooklyn Heights, and it has since blossomed into one of the city's most desirable neighborhoods.

Authoritative street-by-street architectural guide to over 600 houses, buildings in city's first Historic District. 88 illus.

Featured in films and on television and used as a backdrop to countless photos, the Brooklyn Heights Promenade offers the public a view that is usually reserved for the rich at the top of a tower. From this one-third-mile stretch, locals and tourists take in the Manhattan skyline, the Statue of Liberty, Ellis Island and New York Harbor. But its history is less harmonious. Plans by the powerful Robert Moses to run the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway through a resistant neighborhood led to contention and an unforeseen eventual compromise. In this volume, Brooklyn Heights Press editor Henrik Krogius presents this history, along with his articles that document the fate of the Promenade over the years.

Considered one of the city's most notorious industrial slums in the 1940s and 1950s, Brownstone Brooklyn by the 1980s had become a post-industrial landscape of hip bars, yoga studios, and beautifully renovated, wildly expensive townhouses. In The Invention of Brownstone Brooklyn, Suleiman Osman offers a groundbreaking history of this unexpected transformation. Challenging the conventional wisdom that New York City's renaissance started in the 1990s, Osman locates the origins of gentrification in Brooklyn in the cultural upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s. Gentrification began as a grassroots movement led by young and idealistic white college graduates searching for "authenticity" and life outside the burgeoning suburbs. Where postwar city leaders championed slum clearance and modern architecture, "brownstoners" (as they called themselves) fought for a new romantic urban ideal that celebrated historic buildings, industrial lofts and traditional ethnic neighborhoods as a refuge from an increasingly technocratic society. Osman examines the emergence of a "slow-growth" progressive coalition as brownstoners joined with poorer residents to battle city planners and local machine politicians. But as brownstoners migrated into poorer areas, race and class tensions emerged, and by the 1980s, as newspapers parodied yuppies and anti-gentrification activists marched through increasingly expensive neighborhoods, brownstoners debated whether their search for authenticity had been a success or failure.

For the first time, here is Brooklyn's story through the eyes of its greatest storytellers. Like Paris in the twenties or postwar Greenwich Village, Brooklyn today is experiencing an extraordinary cultural boom. In recent years, writers of all stripes—from Jhumpa Lahiri, Jennifer Egan, and Colson Whitehead to Nicole Krauss and Jonathan Safran Foer—have flocked to its patchwork of distinctive neighborhoods. But as literary critic and journalist Evan Hughes reveals, the rich literary life now flourishing in Brooklyn is part of a larger, fascinating history. With a dynamic mix of literary biography and urban history, Hughes takes us on a tour of Brooklyn past and present and reveals that hiding in Walt Whitman's Fort Greene Park, Hart Crane's Brooklyn Bridge, the raw Williamsburg of Henry Miller's youth, Truman Capote's famed house on Willow Street, and the contested streets of Jonathan Lethem's Boerum Hill is the story of more than a century of life in America's cities. Literary Brooklyn is a prismatic investigation into a rich literary inheritance, but most of all it's a deep look into the beloved borough, a place as diverse and captivating as the people who walk its streets and write its stories.

The fifth child in a clan of six children, Outwater was a practiced and skilled observer (in her own words, a good "snoop") trying to make sense of daily life, keeping out of older siblings' way, and bossing her younger sister Louise. From her privileged and personal position, Outwater shares her curious and innocent view of the world from the elegant staircase landings inside her family's three-story Tudor-style brownstone, to the eye-widening views from the street and the world on the other (and under) side of the Brooklyn Bridge. Outwater kept careful watch over it all. Neighborhood outings take readers along to Mr. Chan's Montague Street Chinese laundry and the gypsy encampment under the Brooklyn Bridge. Family stories take readers inside 82 Remsen Street to Grandfather Hooker's magic show with Houdini in attendance, tales of Grandmother Hiles and Auntie Pasco's tramp steamer adventures abroad--including legendary accounts of dressing as Arab men and darkening their skin with beetle nuts to enter Mesopotamia. In addition, Outwater's own recounting of childhood shenanigans such as tummy sliding under the bathroom stalls in Saks, or playing hide and seek in the basement and forgetting friends asleep in the dumb waiter appeal to the curious child in us all. 82 Remsen Street is more than nostalgia. Brooklyn Heights became New York's first suburb in the early 1900s when the Brooklyn Bridge connected the more sheltered Brooklyn community on the East River bluff to Manhattan, and to the tidal changes of the larger outside world. Outwater's generation was sandwiched between two world wars; it navigated a sea of European immigration, and was caught in the wake of the stock market's rise and fall. Outwater wrote these stories so that readers would have some impressions of the unique culture and changes that took place in that era and to give perspective to the decades that followed--the rise of the "baby boom" generation.