Over the last 20 years, New York City has been convulsed by enormous challenges: terrorist attack, blackout, hurricane, recession, pandemic. New Yorkers is a grand portrait of the irrepressible city and a hymn to the vitality and resilience of its people. Craig Taylor spent years meeting New Yorkers – rich and poor, old and young, native and immigrant – and getting them to share indelible true tales. Here are the voices of those who propel the city each day – subway conductor, nurse, bodega cashier, electrician who keeps the lights on at the top of the Empire State Building – as well as unforgettable glimpses of the city, from the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade by a balloon handler to the Statue of Liberty by one of its security guards.
New Yorkers captures the strength of the city that – no matter what it goes through – dares call itself the greatest in the world.
New Yorkers captures the strength of the city that – no matter what it goes through – dares call itself the greatest in the world.
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Reviews
Every decade or so, a book comes along to define an epoch in New York life . . . Craig Taylor's New Yorkers is one of those. It is a monumental document of our age of precarity, catastrophe, and scrolling anomie. Just as importantly, though, it is an antidote, the opposite of a lockdown: a welcoming into the apartments of our neighbors and out into the living street. For those newly arrived to the city or long in love with it, New Yorkers belongs on the short shelf of required reading - Garth Risk Hallberg, author of City on Fire
Craig Taylor has conducted Gotham's voices into a gorgeous score. He has such a gift for getting cities to pause for their solos and close ups. With Londoners and now New Yorkers a decade later, he's like a Carson, a Winfrey, a Letterman of the vox populi: generous with each human he sits down with, making them look good without any makeup and giving them all the best lines. I've never heard New York sound this good, this in tune, despite its seas of trouble - Leanne Shapton, author of Swimming Studies
An engrossing, multihued 'oral portrait' of New York City as told by the people who live there .... Admirers of the Big Apple will be enthralled
An incredible achievement. Insightful, funny, surprising, profound, moving and honest. This could be the great American novel - and it isn't even a novel - Joe Dunthorne, author of Submarine
A monumental and beautiful testimony to a city and to life itself ... This is what Craig Taylor has done: not just reveal a city, but the human spirit that lights the city; that spirit, which despite its flaws and madness, seems in the end to always wish to transform chaos and hatred into meaning and love - Jonathan Ames, author of The Extra Man
One of the most enjoyable trips to New York I've ever taken: fascinating, exciting and weird. Like the very best kind of guide, Craig Taylor showed me parts of the city I would never have found on my own - Chris Power, author of Mothers: Stories
Craig Taylor gets us. His sojourn in New York has resulted in a wonderful portrait of the city and its people, in good times and in bad, living, persevering, triumphant - Kevin Baker, author of Dreamland
As gorgeous, cacophonous and shocking as New York itself. Like those great oral historians Studs Terkel and Ronald Blythe, Craig Taylor has the gift of drawing out the most idiosyncratic confidences, creating a magical, uproarious and sometimes terrifying portrait of life in the ultimate city - Olivia Laing, author of The Lonely City
This is a stunning piece of work. New Yorkers is rich with the voices and stories of the city; voices that Craig Taylor has listened to with attentive generosity and that he offers us here with something close to love - Jon McGregor, author of Reservoir-13
In New Yorkers he has both perfected the method and found new range in his own voice. I lived in the city for six of the years covered here, but though Taylor does capture a tone I remember, I feel more that I've come to know the place better through the lens of his curiosity - John Jeremiah Sullivan, author of Pulphead
Jaw-dropping ... Enthralling ... Start spreading the news: Taylor's book is a stunning work of modern social history
Beautifully woven
Extraordinary city stories ... ambitious and entertaining ... [Taylor] does a fine job of telling the New York story
One of Craig Taylor's many skills as an interviewer lies in his eye for the vivid detail that captures a larger abstraction ... Remarkable
A symphonic choir of voices rising from the five boroughs ... the city is hopping, punching, reeling, dancing, thrumming, honking, thriving ... Taylor is as skilled a writer of literary nonfiction as I have ever read