The 25 Best New York City Novels

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Author: Jay McInerney
Areas Featured: Times Square, SoHo

You wish you were like the protagonist of Jay McInerney's breezy debut, one of the only novels written in the second-person to gain a spot in the canon. When your creative writing instructor first assigned Bright Lights, Big City, you hesitantly dipped in, wary because of the shitty Michael J. Fox movie spawned from its pages. But soon you were greedily devouring the novel. It was like you'd done a few bumps of Bolivian Marching Powder. Suddenly, the future was clear: You would move to New York, land a job that would be fun to hate—fact checking at The New Yorker, say—and spiral out of control beautifully. And for art! And then you'd eat bread and everything would be fine! If Patrick Bateman didn't murder you first... —RS

Author: Mark Harris
Areas Featured: Washington Heights

Damn, this city loves baseball. When you move here from somewhere else, it takes a minute to get used to how quickly you'll learn whether someone follows the Yankees or the Mets. Yes, Bang the Drum Slowly is about baseball. But it's also about how the down-and-out, the have-nots of society, deal with each other.

Harris's novel reminds us that those who have a little can be incredibly cruel or, from time to time, incredibly kind, to those who have even less. You only need to see one argument between a cabbie and a street cart owner, or a shouting match between a super and his starving-artist tenant to notice that these struggles are ingrained in the fabric of New York.

Professional sports, at least back in the days, when the athletes, by and large, weren't making any money, seems an apt analogy for a modern New York. Whether it's dealing with an overrun DMV or a 24-hour McDonalds, it's hard to forget that now, as then, nobody is making any money but the owners. As the Narrator tells the Author: "Baseball is stupid, Author, I hope you put it in your book, a game rigged by rich idiots to keep poor idiots from wising up to how poor they are." —BG

Author: Teju Cole
Areas Featured: Morningside Heights, Harlem, Central Park, Financial District

Julius, the narrator of Teju Cole's lyrical Open City, spends most of the novel walking around. A psychiatric fellow at Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital, he travels up and down the streets of New York, from Morningside Heights to the Financial District, in order to clear his head. He meets many immigrants and emigrants. As an immigrant himself—Julius was born to a German mother and a Nigerian father in Lagos—he feels some affinity with them.

New York is a city of transplants, wandering people. Open City is a novel that asks you to look at Gotham from the perspective of an outsider. The intelligence and grace with which Cole accomplishes this is something to marvel at. —RS

Author: E.L. Doctorow
Areas Featured: Lower East Side, Flatiron

The complicated classic takes place during the rush to the First World War, and involves an upper-class family who has made their fortune selling flags and fireworks to a patriotic and frenzied America. Everything is thrown into confusion by the arrival of an abandoned black child and her troubled mother. And then there's the smartly dressed Coalhouse Walker, the child's alleged father, who wins over the family with his ability to play ragtime on their out-of-tune piano. Then there's the struggling Jewish family approached by high society because of the beauty of their daughter.

The three families encounter each other on a battlefield populated by Harry Houdini, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, Sigmund Freud, Theodore Dreiser, and Robert Peary, just to name a few. The fantastical use of historical figures and the amorphous narrator give the book a dose of magic that allows it to be New York, both in legend and in reality. —GT

Author: Betty Smith
Areas Featured: Williamsburg, Brooklyn

Like the Lower East Side, Williamsburg has seen transformed from an ethnic enclave to a hipster haven, but it would be an affront to the intimate optimism of this novel to dwell on that. This book isn't meant as a historical document (though you can read it as such); instead, it's a sketch of fleeting moments of happiness amongst hardship.

Ultimately, it's about the triumph of the human spirit. Sure, we now know this theme and the image of a tree growing out of concrete as clichés of the highest order, but clichés come about because they state ideas simply and in a way that resonates universally. It isn't the grand themes that touch us in books like this, but small moments rendered carefully: Francie's joy smelling flowers, or her afternoons spent people watching from her fire escape take. These scenes take the many small steps towards conveying Smith's themes. They do the heavy lifting that allow for metaphors, or platitudes, to succeed. —BG

Author: John Rechy
Areas Featured: Times Square, Midtown

City of Night chronicles the life of a young man (written youngman), a hustler in America, as he travels to different cities, embarking on relationships with men. By probing the marginalized gay culture of the '50s and '60s, Rechy riffs on a lot of truth missing from the mainstream writing of that time. Rechy's excesses of language mostly come from his stream-of-consciousness style, especially in New York, where he calls a hot dog cart a "relic from hell" and talks about "the moloch of Times Square." Nevertheless, the work has been influential to artists from Jim Morrison of the Doors to Gus Van Sant. —GT

Author: Mary Gaitskill
Areas Featured: Meatpacking District, East Village

Mary Gaitskill writes with cold clarity about the uglier emotions. Her characters are hurt, and they hurt other people. Veronica follows a woman named Alison, who, from a young age, pursues pleasure and beauty. She becomes a model while still a teenager and travels to Paris. A turbulent love affair, a nightmarish S-and-M club, and other extremes introduce her to what people are capable of; she returns to her home in New Jersey where she tries to become just another community college student. Eventually, she lands in New York. Gaitskill's prose is blistering:

"My sublet was a loft in the meatpacking district, a labyrinth of sleeping rough-faced buildings with sweet and rotten breath...Late that night, the sleeping buildings woke and opened for business. I stood in a window as tall as a door and watched heavy trucks feed fresh-killed beef to an openmouthed warehouse across the street. The light from the open mouth shone on one and a half cows at a time, their bodies hanging inverted on the conveyor belt, heads wagging on fresh-cut throats, horned shadows nodding on the warehouse wall. The belt droned and the massed corpses danced with jiggling forefeet. The man operating the belt whistled a song. A snout and gentle brow was flung out, then rolled back into the mass. The man driving the truck joked with the man running the belt. I can accept this, I thought. I can live this life."

In the city, Alison meets Veronica. It's the '80s and Veronica is one of many New Yorkers dying of AIDS. A counterpoint to the fiercely male novels that focus on the same time period—Bright Lights, Big City, American Psycho—Veronica has the additional advantage of hindsight. If McInerney was still bright-eyed about the possibility of the city, and Ellis was furious and dejected, Gaitskill, writing in the 2000s, is calm. She observes the fallout and writes from a distance. —RS

Author: Washington Irving
Areas Featured: Lower Manhattan

Though he's largely remembered today as the man who brought us children's stories starring memorable characters like Rip Van Winkle and Ichabod Crane, Washington Irving's savage sense of satire was what actually cemented him as the first American literary icon.

Before his famous Sketch Book, Irving dropped this hilariously self-important local history as way to take shots at pompous historians and self-satisfied bureaucrats. New York is still so often the center of American social satire today; all of that began with Irving.

In addition to the on-point socio-political commentary, Irving's tactics in preparing the book for publication also remind us of something we might see from Colbert or Stewart. Irving took out ads in New York newspapers looking for information regarding the book's crusty Dutch academic protagonist, Deidrich Knickerbocker, and then answered the ads himself. All of this was done for both distraction and promotion while preparing the book for publication in Philly, catching his satirical targets in Gotham by surprise.

If the debt owed to Irving by American humorists from Twain to Vonnegut doesn't do it for you, remember that without this dude, for better or worse, the Knicks would have a different name. —BG

Author: Sylvia Plath
Areas Featured: Upper East Side

The semi-autobiographical story of a girl who comes to New York to work for a magazine and then leaves, taking some dark parts of the city with her, opens with one of the most striking first sentences in American literature: "It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn't know what I was doing in New York."

The sentence dates the action as taking place in 1953, the height of McCarthy's Red Scare, and the mounting political frenzy mimics the paranoia eating our narrator away from the inside. Esther buys shoes at Bloomingdale's on her lunch break and attends parties inside the Waldorf-Astoria, meeting authors. She's haunted by the looks of women frozen on billboards, clinging to men.

Plath's achievement has the grace of Virginia Woolf with a vulnerability rarely heard then or since. —GT

Author: Henry Roth
Areas Featured: Lower East Side

While many buildings in the Lower East Side have been keenly preserved, and places like the Tenement Museum keep the history of a neighborhood known for so long as "The Jewish Lower East Side" in our cultural consciousness, the LES of today is a totally different animal compared to what it once was.

It's no secret that the 1960s saw a transformed Lower Manhattan, first home to down-and-out artists before giving way to themed bars and luxury condos. In less than a century, the neighborhood has transformed from a ghetto to a haven for the slumming stylish and chic.

Call It Sleep is the story of families coping with repressed emotions and deeply held secrets as they struggle to make a new life in America. It's the story of a boy exploring both sides of faith: sin and cleansing. It's a story whose home is, as the New York Times once put it, "the city gutter and the tenement cellar." It's a story alien to the Lower East Side of today, unless you head to the Tenement Museum or pick up a used copy of this book on the racks of a trendy book store. —BG

Author: Nella Larsen
Areas Featured: Harlem

Clare and Irene, the protagonists of Nella Larsen's second and final novel, Passing, knew each other as children. They lost touch, only to meet later in life, in Chicago. Irene learns that Clare has been "passing" (living as a white person despite her black heritage), and has, in fact, married a white racist. Meanwhile, Irene lives in Harlem with her husband, a physician, and both are deeply involved in the Harlem Renaissance. The chance meeting and the revelation that Clare has been passing sets into motion a complicated look at the construction of identity. —RS

Author: L.J. Davis
Areas Featured: Clinton Hill, Brooklyn; Upper West Side

L.J. Davis flips Manifest Destiny on its head by sending Lowell Lake, the protagonist of the hilarious, caustic A Meaningful Life, from California to Brooklyn: Go East, young man, and meet your pathetic end. Lake works as the managing editor of plumbing magazine and his life needs direction. He gets the idea to fix up a brownstone in Brooklyn (Clinton Hill, specifically.) Here's Davis, writing in 1971:

"Lowell could remember neither where he'd seen the article nor precisely what it said, but he recalled the general drift. That was all he needed. Creative young people were buying houses in the Brooklyn slums, integrating all-Negro blocks, and coming firmly to grips with poverty and municipal corruption. It was the stuff of life. It was what he was looking for."

For all the starry-eyed hipsters of Brooklyn, here's a sobering does of nihilism. Is it artisanal? Fuck you. —RS

Author: Edith Wharton
Areas Featured: Midtown, Financial District, Long Island

This story of New York society takes places during the dawn of the 20th century, after the Industrial Revolution, but before World War One. (Downton Abbey gives an idea of the period.) Beautiful 29-year-old Lily Bart doesn't want to settle for prosperous marriage, though she's highly sought after. Instead, she wishes for mutual respect and love, or, if that doesn't shake out, financial independence. Her strength of will only sets her up for failure, as she loses the interest of the only man who provides any challenge for her, Lawrence Selden. She aimlessly drifts into addiction.

Nevertheless, Lily is a strong, magnetic character, braving the storm of manners and hollow propriety of the elite. This is a very different New York than most books allow you a look at: 5th Avenue parlors, trips to the beach, estates just out of town, and trips to Wall Street, where this new kind of market is selling stocks... —GT

Author: Richard Price
Areas Featured: Lower East Side

One of America's greatest living writers of dialogue, Richard Price made a name for himself with Clockers, the thoroughly-researched crime novel that paved the way for his stint as a writer on The Wire. Lush Life finds Price walking the crime beat to great effect, investigating a murder in the Lower East Side. Though the crime seems open-and-shut, its tendrils extend deeply into the myriad of cultures brushing up against each other in the rapidly-evolving neighborhood. Tracing its causes and effects provides Price with the perfect excuse to dig into the diverse milieu of the LES. —RS

Author: Richard Yates
Areas Featured: Midtown

From the opening line, the reader knows The Easter Parade won't end well: "Neither of the Grimes sister would have a happy life," he writes. And still the reader journeys with Yates, following Sarah and Emily Grimes to see just how unhappy things can get. How unhappy? Oof. Ultimately, it's the character of Emily, who moves to Manhattan to work for a advertising firm, that reflects the New York in the novel. Move to the city, get a job that crushes you, sleep with people who aren't right for you, people who will hurt you—sound like anyone you know? The familiarity of the tale makes it all the more unbearable. —RS

Author: Tom Wolfe
Areas Featured: Bronx, Harlem, Upper East Side, Lower Manhattan

Everyone in New York City has a hustle. Though The Bonfire of the Vanities dotes on a self-centered Wall Street titan and his mistress as they do the sort of things literary stock brokers and mistresses do, Wolfe's novel takes a more systemic look at the ways New York's numerous power brokers persistently jockey for advantage during even the most tragic situations. A washed-up journalist, a Harlem-based reverend, and a team of lawyers all manipulate the lives of others for personal and political gain.

In 2007, the Times ran a piece looking at New York twenty years after Bonfire. The piece looked to power brokers like (and in some cases, the alleged inspiration for) those portrayed in Wolfe's book for their perspective on how the city has changed in the years since the novel's publication. They all cited substantive changes in the socio-political landscape, from race relations to crime prevention, changes they claim have placed the problems of Bonfire in the rear-view mirror.

Edward W. Hayes, a lawyer and friend of Wolfe's went so far as to say "today there is not enough crime to be a criminal lawyer." While many of these things may be true, what's most striking about the article is that the same power brokers that Wolfe skewered in Bonfire were still players in a position to comment on how power has "shifted" in 21st century New York. Perhaps, then, things haven't changed. —BG

Author: Bret Easton Ellis
Areas Featured: Financial District, Upper West Side, Chelsea, Meatpacking District, Upper East Side

Mentally prepare yourself before reading Bret Easton Ellis's reviled-yet-awesome American Psycho. In fact, just pay attention to the opening line, borrowed from Dante to be garrishly writ here in red graffiti: "Abandon all hope ye who enter here." Take the advice to heart.

In 2012, most of the readers encountering the depths of American Psycho will do so because of Mary Harron's excellent reading of the film, with Christian Bale playing Patrick Bateman. A(nother) word of advice: Forget what you saw. Herron's film is a satire. Ellis's novel is not. Sure, you'll laugh during the business card bit, and one long, exasperating conference call, but ultimately the novel isn't a satire. That would be too easy. There's other work to be done in this evisceration of the 1980s.

Ellis lays into food culture (one aspect of his period piece that's immediately relevant), the numbing business that is fashion, and more, all with a blistering gaze. He flattens language with a grossly flat tone that swallows everything it touches. Bateman speaks about Armani suits and stabbing a person in the eyes with the same dead style. This is a horror novel, only we're the monsters. But even that's a simplification of a novel that has to be endured to be believed. —RS

Author: Jonathan Lethem
Areas Featured: Downtown Brooklyn, Park Slope, Prospect Heights, Cobble Hill

An inventive take on the whodunit made playful with Tourettes-inspired language and loving descriptions of downtown Brooklyn, Motherless Brooklyn earned Jonathan Lethem the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction in 1999.

The action begins when mobster Frank Minna is found murdered. Lionel Essrog, our Tourettes-afflicted narrator who looked up to Minna like a father, sets out to find the culprit. Corporate treachery and big-time crime kingpins join the knotty mess, but Brooklyn is the novel's heart. Lethem grew up in Boerum Hill when it was still North Gowanus, and he loves his old haunts. Make sure that you're in spitting distance of a deli when you crack this open, as Lethem's evocative descriptions will have you craving a roast beef and horseradish sandwich from the corner store badly. —RS

Author: Truman Capote
Areas Featured: Upper East Side

There is a class of men and women that are as much a part of the scenery of New York City as park benches and neon store fronts. They're beautiful people who dress to present their style to the public. They seemingly have little else to do. You'll be on your way to work a weekend shift, and you'll pass them nibbling on brunch. On the way home, you'll see them smoking in front of a bar a few blocks down from brunch.

In a town where rent is so damn high, these people don't invite much sympathy. The great trick that Truman Capote pulls off in this slender volume is to paint a sympathetic portrait of one of these so-called "café-society girls."

So much about Holly Golightly is superficially distasteful, with her collections of baubles given as gifts from sad old men. The repeated invitations to judge her sets the reader up for the emotional reveals, when Holly's vulnerability is made plain.

Like in this passage: "Good luck: and believe me, dearest Doc -- it's better to look at the sky than live there. Such an empty place; so vague. Just a country where the thunder goes and things disappear." —BG

Author: Hubert Selby, Jr.
Areas Featured: Sunset Park, Brooklyn; Navy Yard, Brooklyn; Upper West Side

Perhaps it's because Hubert Selby, Jr. dropped out of school to divide his time between grimy Brooklyn and the Merchant Marines that allowed him to create such a powerful body of work dominated by the gutters of everyday life.

Last Exit to Brooklyn finds Selby writing at the peak of his powers. As a reward, the book was treated to an obscenity trial in the UK, and was banned in Italy. Selby pulls no punches, and but for a single character in the book, this collection of junkies, prostitutes, and thugs all receive some thoroughly unrelenting punishment.

Selby eschews an abundance of real street corners and landmarks for an aggregate Brooklyn, accomplished formally by his fast-paced phonetic rhetoric reminiscent of the Beats.

Despite all the horror of the book, there are glimpses of intelligence and hope that testify to its importance and beauty. —GT

Author: Michael Chabon
Areas Featured: Midtown, Flatiron

While the climactic moment atop the Empire State Building offers the most iconic image from Michael Chabon's masterpiece, its the early moments in the lives of the young artists that will resonate with anyone who's ever moved somewhere with a dream. The cautious, yet joyous labors of Sammy and Joe during their early days in New York, and the ups and down of their friendship as their careers take shape, must feel deeply familiar to any actor, musician, artist, or writer who has cracked this tome.

While reading, one is struck, not only by Chabon's clear love for the art of comic books, but also his admiration for the creation of art. The latter is one of the things that helps Kavalier and Clay take up permanent residence in the back of the reader's mind. This excerpt likely feels all too familiar to many twentysomething New Yorkers spread across Queens, Brooklyn, and the still-affordable pockets of Manhattan:

"In the immemorial style of young men under pressure, they decided to lie down for a while and waste time. They took their shoes off, rolled up their shirtsleeves, and loosened their neckties. They moved ashtrays around, swept stacks of magazines to the floor, put a record on, and generally acted as if they owned the place. They were in the room where the boy-genius artists kept their drawing tables and taborets, a room variously referred to by its occupants over the years as the Bullpen, the Pit, the Rathole, and Palooka Studios, the latter a name often applied to the entire apartment, to the building, occasionally to the neighborhood, and even, on grim, hungover, hacking mornings with a view out the bathroom window of a sunrise the color of bourbon and ash, to the whole damn stinking world." —BG

Author: J.D. Salinger
Areas Featured: Greenwich Village, Midtown, Central Park

The Catcher in the Rye is so ingrained in the public consciousness, so ubiquitous, it's strange to think of it as just a New York novel. When revisiting Catcher with an eye to the Big Apple, however, the reader is reminded of the symbolic weight of so many of the novel's locations. From the Eskimo dioramas in the Museum of Natural History to the ducks in Central Park,  Manhattan becomes Salinger's shorthand for loneliness and alienation. There are fleeting moments of beauty and happiness, like the carousel ride in Central Park, but these images are largely snuffed out by drunken regret in hotel lobbies and bars.

Writing about Salinger's work makes it sounds depressing, even hopeless. When we remember our early experiences with Salinger, though, we likely remember the levity of the idealistic moments that punctuate the eternal disappointment with the phoniness of humanity. Holden Caulfield's hopeful longing in the midst of misery is perhaps what makes this a New York novel, rather than mere geography. —BG

Author: James Baldwin
Areas Featured: Greenwich Village, Harlem

With Another Country, Baldwin delivers a perfect piece of fiction centered around the smaller communities of the Big Apple. He makes a bold move by introducing a dynamic and troubled black jazz musician, Rufus, and then throwing him off the George Washington Bridge in the first 70 pages.

The rest of the book revolves around the loss of this beautiful man, as felt by his friends and family. Oscillating between Rufus' family's Harlem and the Jazz and literary scenes of Greenwich Village, the book delves into the struggles of gender and race, where love and hate sometimes seem like the only weapons against the enormous weight of the world.

The book contemplates homosexuality, racism, sexism, art, and morality, and contains some of the most beautiful passages on sex and fear in Baldwin's impressive career. —GT

Author: Don DeLillo
Areas Featured: Washington Heights; the Bronx

This long and ambitious work from postmodern master Don DeLillo stands out for the historical events and figures woven effortlessly into the narrative. The story opens with a young boy sneaking into the 1951 New York Giants and Brooklyn Dodgers game. He ends up running off with the Giant's pennant winning ball, famously referred to as "the shot heard round the world." From here, the novel expands outward to draw the Cold War, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the very fabric of America into its colossal gravitational pull. Frank Sinatra and Lenny Bruce make cameos; J. Edgar Hoover looms large.

DeLillo was born in the Bronx, and his closeness to the city can be felt in the novel's most sublime moments, the opening especially. —GT

Author: Ralph Ellison
Areas Featured: Midtown, Lower East Side, Harlem

Almost an allegory at times, Invisible Man uses some well-worn story arcs to propel the nameless protagonist on an Oz-like journey through a world that is of course ours, and yet fantastical, too. The Invisible Man journeys from the South to New York, encountering characters like tall tales, or German expressionist creations jumping out from behind corners. Ellison uses a steady hand to tell his story of what it means to be Black in America, but embraces irony in place of moralizing. At the novel's close, the Invisible Man is bunkered down in Harlem, in a basement full of light. He may be ready to emerge, to bring that light out. The reader can only hope. —GT