Tottenville is located on the southwestern tip of Staten Island and is the southernmost point in New York City and New York State. Far from the urban culture of Manhattan, Tottenville boasts a feeling of independence and isolation. The village of Tottenville came into being around 1840. Its economy and culture arose from oyster fishing, shipbuilding and ship repair, and agriculture. Its trade routes with New Jersey and New York City linked it to the metropolitan region and the greater world. It became the largest town in Westfield, the historic name for this quarter of Staten Island. Even today, although a part of New York City, and encroached upon by modern suburban culture, the feeling of a small coastal town prevails with characteristics unlike any other place on Staten Island. This book documents the activities of the people who created Tottenville and caused it to flourish.

Presents a collection of short stories featuring noir and crime fiction about Staten Island, New York, by such authors as Todd Craig, Linda Nieves-Powell, S. J. Rozan, and Patricia Smith.

“Nersesian’s extravagantly imagined dystopia relies—as did those in Philip Roth’s Plot Against America and Michael Chabon’s Yiddish Policemen’s Union—on an alternate, counterfactual history.”—The New York Times Book Review “Combining sci-fi space/time-warping, Unabomber-style political ranting and an overall air of goose-bump paranoia, this is one turbo-charged trip. . . . A sharp, strange read: Imagine William Burroughs and Philip K. Dick sharing a needle.”—Kirkus Reviews “Brilliant.”—Time Out New York Arthur Nersesian’s six previous novels (including The Fuck-Up, MTV/Pocket Books, which has sold over 100,000 copies) have focused on the tragicomedy of fin de siècle New York City. Here, in his boldest novel to date, Nersesian has broken through into a new landscape that at once fuses the real with the surreal, the psychological with the psychedelic. He lives in New York City.

Were there really four airports here? Was the Staten Island Airport shut down each night to ensure no peril to the patrons of the drive-in theater? Is there truly a 150 foot dormant tunnel under the harbor between Staten Island and Brooklyn with the entrance capped in Brooklyn? In the 1930's, Which of Staten Island's best known restaurateurs, bought a house across the street from his famous restaurant and built a 200-foot tunnel between the house and the restaurant so that he could safely carry the day's receipts from the restaurant to his home. Did President John Kennedy, sip coffee at the St. George ferry terminal? Can you believe that a famous Island milk company resorted to rowboats to delivery milk to areas from Oakwood to Midland Beach during some of the worst storms to every hit that area? Did Buffalo Bill Cody and Annie Oakley have a Wild West show in 1886 down at Erastina (Mariners Harbor)? In what year was a bomb actually exploded on a Staten Island Ferry?

Inspired by Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales, this collection of loosely linked tragicomic short stories travels across time to explore defining moments in the island's history, from the 2003 Staten Island Ferry crash and the New York City blackout to the growing opioid and heroin crisis, Eric Garner's murder, and the 2016 presidential election.