Tales of Two Cities - The Best and Worst of Times in Today's New York

Thirty major contemporary writers examine life in a deeply divided New York 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.

Product details

• Authors: John Freeman, John (EDT) Freeman
• Assisted by: John Freeman (Editor)
• Publisher: Penguin Books USA
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback
• Released: 08.09.2015
• EAN: 9780143128304
• ISBN: 978-0-14-312830-4
• No. of pages: 288
• Dimensions: 140 mm x 210 mm x 18 mm
• Series: Penguin Publishing Group
• Subjects: Fiction > Narrative literature; New York, SOCIAL SCIENCE / Poverty & Homelessness, SOCIAL SCIENCE / Human Services, Poverty & unemployment, Social welfare & social services, Social classes, SOCIAL SCIENCE / Social Classes & Economic Disparity, Housing & homelessness, Poverty and precarity, Housing and homelessness, Social welfare, social policy and social services, New York (state)