Tales of Two Cities: Stories of Inequality in a Divided New York - John Freeman

In a city where the top one percent earns more than a half-million dollars per year while twenty-five thousand children are homeless, public discourse about our entrenched and worsening wealth gap has never been more sorely needed.

This remarkable anthology is the literary world's response, with leading lights including Zadie Smith, Junot Díaz, and Lydia Davis bearing witness to the experience of ordinary New Yorkers in extraordinarily unequal circumstances. Through fiction and reportage, these writers convey the indignities and heartbreak, the callousness and solidarities, of living side by side with people of starkly different means. They shed light on the subterranean lives of homeless people who must find a bed in the city's tunnels; the stresses that gentrification can bring to neighbors in a Brooklyn apartment block; the shenanigans of seriously alienated night-shift paralegals; the trials of a housing defendant standing up for tenants' rights; and the humanity that survives in the midst of a deeply divided city.

Tales of Two Cities is a brilliant, moving, and ultimately galvanizing clarion call for a city-and a nation-in crisis.

Introduction by John Freeman --
Due North / Garnette Cadogan --
Options / Dinaw Mengestu --
Every night a little death / Patrick Ryan --
Miss Adele amidst the corsets / Zadie Smith --
Near the edge of darkness / Colum McCann --
The children suicides / Maria Venegas --
Partially vacated / DW Gibson --
Four more years / Jonathan Dee --
So where are we? / Lawrence Joseph --
Round trip / Skhil Dharma --
Aliens of extraordinary ability / Taiye Selasi --
The baffled courtier: Lorenzo da Ponte in America / Edmund White --
Quid pro quo, just as easy as that / Jeanne Thornton --
Introduction / Dave Eggers --
Park slope livin' / Chaasadahyah Jackson --
One, maybe two minutes from fire / Téa Obreht --
Service/nonservice: how bartenders see New Yorkers / Rosie Schaap --
A block divided against itself / Sarah Jaffe --
Starting out / Junot Díaz --
Engine / Bill Cheng --
The sixth borough / Jonathan Safran Foer --
Mixed media, dimensions variable / Michael Salu --
First Avenue & Second Street / Hannah Tinti --
Zapata Boulevard / Valeria Luiselli --
Home / Tim Freeman --
Introduction. Small fates 1912 / Teju Cole --
Small fates 1912 / Teju Cole --
Seeking / Victor Lavalle --
If the 1 percent stifles New York's creative talent, I'm out of here / David Byrne --
Traveling from Brooklyn / Lydia Davis --
Walt Whitman on Further Lane / Mark Doty

288 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2014

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