Walking Tree New York: Travel with a Writer

A sharp, witty account of how New York is lived, imagined, and performed—part of Travel with a Writer, The Walking Tree’s series pairing leading authors with the places they know best.  New York City is at once a physical place and a shared fiction, layered over millions of individual lives. Sometimes these versions align. More often, they don’t. In this playful and perceptive work of literary nonfiction, Catherine Lacey moves through neighborhoods, stories, and cultural touchstones to explore the city’s peculiar social logic: how complaining creates intimacy, how eccentricity becomes a form of belonging, and why leaving is rarely as simple as it seems. Attuned to both the myths and the mundane, she reveals how New York is continually made and remade by the people who move through it.  Wry, incisive, and deeply attuned to contradiction, this is an account of a city that exists as much in the mind as on the map—and of why it continues to hold such power over those who encounter it.