This sweeping history of New York’s millions of immigrants, both famous and forgotten, is “told brilliantly [and] unforgettably” (The Boston Globe). Written by an acclaimed historian and including maps and photos, this is the story of the peoples who have come to New York for four centuries: an American story of millions of immigrants, hundreds of languages, and one great city. Growing from Peter Minuit’s tiny settlement of 1626 to a clamorous metropolis with more than three million immigrants today, the city has always been a magnet for transplants from around the globe. City of Dreams is the long-overdue, inspiring, and defining account of the young man from the Caribbean who relocated to New York and became a founding father; Russian-born Emma Goldman, who condoned the murder of American industrialists as a means of aiding downtrodden workers; Dominican immigrant Oscar de la Renta, who dressed first ladies from Jackie Kennedy to Michelle Obama; and so many more. Over ten years in the making, Tyler Anbinder’s story is one of innovators and artists, revolutionaries and rioters, staggering deprivation and soaring triumphs. In so many ways, today’s immigrants are just like those who came to America in centuries past—and their stories have never before been told with such breadth of scope, lavish research, and resounding spirit. “Anbinder is a master at taking a history with which many readers will be familiar—tenement houses, temperance societies, slums—and making it new, strange, and heartbreakingly vivid. The stories of individuals, including those of the entrepreneurial Steinway brothers and the tragic poet Pasquale D’Angelo, are undeniably compelling, but it’s Anbinder’s stunning image of New York as a true city of immigrants that captures the imagination.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

A vivid history of the controversial building of Dodger Stadium and how it helped transform Los Angeles When Walter O’Malley moved his Brooklyn Dodgers to Los Angeles in 1957 with plans to construct a new ballpark, he ignited a bitter half-decade dispute over the future of a rapidly changing city. For the first time, City of Dreams tells the full story of the controversial building of Dodger Stadium and how it helped create modern Los Angeles. In a vivid narrative, Jerald Podair tells how the city was convulsed over whether, where, and how to build the stadium. Eventually, it was built on publicly owned land from which the city had uprooted a Mexican American community, raising questions about the relationship between private profit and “public purpose.” Indeed, the battle over Dodger Stadium crystallized issues with profound implications for all American cities. Filled with colorful stories, City of Dreams will fascinate anyone who is interested in the history of the Dodgers, baseball, Los Angeles, and the modern American city.

A lushly drawn graphic novel detailing the willing submission of a young woman desperate to be dominated by her Prince Charming.

In this carefully researched and hauntingly written memoir, Lisa Gruenberg not only records her own life, but also that of relatives long lost to darkness, terror, and murder. In dreamlike sequences she weaves known facts of the lives of those lost into tableaus of imagined family dinners, conversations and leisure activities set in the Vienna landscape. She especially brings back to life some of the girls and women whose fates remain largely unknown. Indeed, she embodies her aunt Mia as she walks in her shoes, sees with her eyes, and speaks with her voice. These flights into the past are presented within the framework of Gruenberg's own family, her husband and daughters, and her father. He escaped from Vienna in 1939 and shared few of his memories with her, and that only late in life when disease had beaten down his defenses against remembering. The trauma and feeling of guilt often described in Holocaust survivors is reflected in this memoir, also the burden shared by so many of their children and grandchildren. At the same time, this tale is one of lightness and finding balance in all these difficulties and trials. There is an endless network of cousins and friends of cousins, one more colorful than the next. They are spread all over the world and Gruenberg seeks many of them out in her search for the past. At the center stands author's ability to look at the truth unflinchingly, including truths apparent in herself. She shares her insights in all their nakedness, starkness and, yes, hilarity. This, together with the author's luminous prose, make My City of Dreams an important landmark in 21st century testimony of the Holocaust.

Paramount: City of Dreams brings to life the operations of the world’s grandest movie lot as never before by opening its famous gates and revealing – for the first time – the wonderful myriad of soundstages and outdoor sets where, for one hundred years, Paramount has produced the world’s most famous films. With hundreds and hundreds of rare and unpublished photographs in color and black & white, readers are launched aboard a fun and entertaining “virtual tour” of Hollywood’s first, most famous and most mysterious motion picture studio. Paramount is a self-contained city. But unlike any community in the real world, this city’s streets and lawns, its bungalows and backlots, will be familiar even to those who have never been there. Now, for the first time, these much-filmed, much-haunted acres will be explored and the mysteries and myths peeled away – bringing into focus the greatest of all of Hollywood’s legendary dream factories.

Buildings, roads and bridges made up the city, Kanti knew that. So did trees, rivers and hills. But he had never quite thought about people. He was told that they, too, were integral parts of a metropolis; if Kathmandu were an organism, people were its red blood cells, navigating busily through road-veins and street-arteries. City of Dreams is set in the multifaceted, fast-changing Nepali capital, Kathmandu. And through a series of deftly woven short stories, it exposes the interaction of city-dwellers with this teeming, schizophrenic metropolis, caught in the tussle between tradition and modernity. In the title story, a Kathmandu native wanders the streets of his hometown and encounters a deep secret. In 'The Presence of God', a couple bickers about faith and ambivalence, only to be confronted with an event so inexplicable that it changes the very foundations of their argument. In 'Dashain' a young man's attempt to leap into adulthood goes horribly awry. And in 'The Smoker'-the only story set outside Kathmandu, in New York City-a writer begins his quest to craft the perfect narrative; yet, even here, the Nepali city is a shadowy presence. As Kathmandu becomes the protagonist of the collection, what we see emerge is not just the skeletal outline of the metropolis, a cartographer's map, but a capital of stories. City of Dreams is one of the most startling literary debuts in recent times.

From bestselling author Gary Krist, the story of the metropolis that never should have been and the visionaries who dreamed it into reality Little more than a century ago, the southern coast of California—bone-dry, harbor-less, isolated by deserts and mountain ranges—seemed destined to remain scrappy farmland. Then, as if overnight, one of the world’s iconic cities emerged. At the heart of Los Angeles’ meteoric rise were three flawed visionaries: William Mulholland, an immigrant ditch-digger turned self-taught engineer, designed the massive aqueduct that would make urban life here possible. D.W. Griffith, who transformed the motion picture from a vaudeville-house novelty into a cornerstone of American culture, gave L.A. its signature industry. And Aimee Semple McPherson, a charismatic evangelist who founded a religion, cemented the city’s identity as a center for spiritual exploration. All were masters of their craft, but also illusionists, of a kind. The images they conjured up—of a blossoming city in the desert, of a factory of celluloid dreamworks, of a community of seekers finding personal salvation under the California sun—were like mirages liable to evaporate on closer inspection. All three would pay a steep price to realize these dreams, in a crescendo of hubris, scandal, and catastrophic failure of design that threatened to topple each of their personal empires. Yet when the dust settled, the mirage that was LA remained. Spanning the years from 1900 to 1930, The Mirage Factory is the enthralling tale of an improbable city and the people who willed it into existence by pushing the limits of human engineering and imagination.