Confession: I had a hard time at first coming up with books for this post.
There are a million books set in NYC, but the New York in my head is the New York of TV and movies: Friends, Castle, pretty much every Nora Ephron film ever made. (I once spent an entire solo vacation pretending to be Kathleen Kelly.) Plus, New York is always changing: every book set there captures a slightly different city, filtered through a different historical era or narrator’s perspective.
I’d be remiss, though, if I didn’t gather up a handful of books about this beautiful, gritty, bewitching city. So here are my New York favorites for you. Please add yours in the comments!
Children’s Lit/Classics
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Betty Smith
I loved this book as a child – dreamy Francie, her hardworking mother and exuberant Aunt Sissy, and the hope and heartbreak of growing up in turn-of-the-century Brooklyn.
The Saturdays, Elizabeth Enright
I adore this first book in the Melendy series, about four siblings who live in a big, comfortably shabby brownstone with their father and their housekeeper-general, Cuffy. The siblings take turns exploring the city by themselves on Saturdays, and the sense of wonder and independence is exactly right.
From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, E.L. Konigsberg
Claudia and her little brother Jamie run away from home – to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, as one does. When I visited the Met for the first time as an adult, I thought about them sneaking through the halls at night and scrounging coins from the fountain.
Harriet the Spy, Louise Fitzhugh
Harriet’s childhood was so different from mine: a brownstone with a dumbwaiter! Ole Golly! Tomato sandwiches and chocolate egg creams! It all seemed fantastically exotic to me. But Harriet is a New York girl through and through.
Remember Me to Harold Square, Paula Danziger
This fun middle-grade novel is built around a New York scavenger hunt undertaken by three kids – so it contains lots of city trivia. But it’s fast-paced, funny and highly entertaining.
Nonfiction/Memoir
Here is New York, E.B. White
White wrote this long essay in 1949, after the city and the world had been transformed by two world wars. But reading it in the wake of 9/11, it still feels eerily relevant. He evokes so well the combination of hope and possibility and fear, the vibrant rhythm of the city streets. (I found my copy at the Strand, pictured above.)
Act One, Moss Hart
An inside look at the mid-century NYC theatre world from one of the great playwrights. Hart’s voice is wry, witty and warm. (I picked this one up at Three Lives & Co. in the West Village.)
My First New York, various authors
New York is beautiful and brutal, and it glitters with possibility. This collection of about 50 essays captures the dazzling range of New York experiences: gorgeous, bewildering, always exciting. (I bought my copy at Shakespeare & Co. on the Upper East Side.)
Eat the City, Robin Shulman
Despite its reputation as a concrete jungle, NYC teems with food production: gardens, breweries, farms. Shulman explores the city’s history through its food producers, past and present. (Another Strand find.)
Home Cooking: A Writer in the Kitchen, Laurie Colwin
Colwin writes with wit and grace about food, love, and tiny New York apartments. I especially love “Alone in the Kitchen with an Eggplant.”
Garlic and Sapphires, Ruth Reichl
Reichl visited dozens of restaurants as the New York Times food critic, often in disguise. This is a rarefied New York, but it’s so much fun (and mouthwateringly described).
Fiction
Rules of Civility, Amor Towles
A glittering tale of high society, love and ambition in 1930s New York. Gorgeously written.
The Swans of Fifth Avenue, Melanie Benjamin
A razor-sharp, elegantly written imagining of Truman Capote and the circle of wealthy socialite “swans,” notably Babe Paley, who were his darlings in 1950s NYC.
The View from Penthouse B and The Family Man, Elinor Lipman
Lipman writes witty comedies of manners, and these two novels both draw New York in quick, loving strokes.
Girl in Translation and Mambo in Chinatown, Jean Kwok
Kwok’s novels both feature Chinese-American protagonists struggling to make their way in NYC. She draws the sharp contrasts of New York – enormous privilege next to great poverty; immigrant traditions and the siren call of the new – so well.
Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Jonathan Safran Foer
This novel is tragic, moving and sometimes very funny . It is an incredible mosaic of New York: all the lives and the loneliness (and the post-9/11 cocktail of fear, love and loss).
Brooklyn, Colm Toibin
Eilis Lacey emigrates from her small Irish town to Brooklyn in the 1950s, struggling to build a life for herself. This is a lovely evocation of a vanished New York, with a quietly appealing main character.
Bunheads, Sophie Flack
A well-written YA novel about a young ballet dancer in New York – who starts to wonder if the world of ballet is where she truly belongs. Captures the constant possibility that thrums through the city.
Links (not affiliate links) are to my favorite local bookstore, Brookline Booksmith.
What are your favorite books about (or set in) NYC?
cakes, tea and dreams 
Aside from Marvel comics 😉
I would add Let the Great World Spin to the list. It’s one of my favorite books!
Well, the comics are definitely your area rather than mine. 😉 And I thought of Let the Great World Spin – but I haven’t read it! Must remedy that.
So many great suggestions! I love Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler… And Francie… And Harriet! I haven’t read as many of the books on your other lists, so I’m going to have to fix that.
Hands down, my favorite NYC book (which I know I talk about all the time) is Time And Again, by Jack Finney. My favorite scene is when the main character realizes that he has successfully traveled back in time because he can see the lights of the Met from his hotel room, and in his present day there would have been buildings blocking the view. So atmospheric!
My MIL loves Time and Again, but I haven’t read it yet. (Tried it once but I think I wasn’t in the right mood.) Must try again!
All-of-a-Kind Family, and the sequels
Yes! So good.
So many choices.
The Alienist by Caleb Carr and City of Dreams by Beverly Swirling. Both of these are a bit grim at times but such great stories of early Manhattan.
All the Chaim Potok books. I read these 40 years ago and have thought about reading them again.
The Museum of Extraordinary Things by Alice Hoffman. I probably wouldn’t have read this on my own but it was a book club selection last year and I just loved it.
I enjoyed Rules of Civility as much as any book I’ve read in recent years.
Lots of titles here I haven’t read!
New York Trilogy by Paul Auster.
I’ve only been to NYC once but I loved it. There is no where else quite like it. I like this quote from Dorothy Parker from 1928. She wrote for the New Yorker magazine. Another great book about the New Yorker is “Genius in Disguise: Harold Ross of the New Yorker” by Thomas Kunkel.
This is from an essay Dorothy Parker wrote for McCall’s magazine in 1928. Your host thinks you will love it …
_______________________________
“My Home Town”
It occurs to me that there are other towns. It occurs to me so violently that I say, at intervals, “Very well, if New York is going to be like this, I’m going to live somewhere else.” And I do—that’s the funny part of it. But then one day there comes to me the sharp picture of New York at its best, on a shiny blue-and-white Autumn day with its buildings cut diagonally in halves of light and shadow, with its straight neat avenues colored with quick throngs, like confetti in a breeze. Someone, and I wish it had been I, has said that “Autumn is the Springtime of big cities.” I see New York at holiday time, always in the late afternoon, under a Maxfield Parrish sky, with the crowds even more quick and nervous but even more good-natured, the dark groups splashed with the white of Christmas packages, the lighted holly-strung shops urging them in to buy more and more. I see it on a Spring morning, with the clothes of the women as soft and as hopeful as the pretty new leaves on a few, brave trees. I see it at night, with the low skies red with the black-flung lights of Broadway, those lights of which Chesterton—or they told me it was Chesterton—said, “What a marvelous sight for those who cannot read!” I see it in the rain, I smell the enchanting odor of wet asphalt, with the empty streets black and shining as ripe olives. I see it—by this time, I become maudlin with nostalgia—even with its gray mounds of crusted snow, its little Appalachians of ice along the pavements. So I go back. And it is always better than I thought it would be.
I suppose that is the thing about New York. It is always a little more than you had hoped for. Each day, there, is so definitely a new day. “Now we’ll start over,” it seems to say every morning, “and come on, let’s hurry like anything.”
London is satisfied, Paris is resigned, but New York is always hopeful. Always it believes that something good is about to come off, and it must hurry to meet it. There is excitement ever running its streets. Each day, as you go out, you feel the little nervous quiver that is yours when you sit in the theater just before the curtain rises. Other places may give you a sweet and soothing sense of level; but in New York there is always the feeling of “Something’s going to happen.” It isn’t peace. But, you know, you do get used to peace, and so quickly. And you never get used to New York.
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LOVE. That is entirely perfect.
I love Parker’s writing – I had a cat with long gray hair and a wonderfully rude attitude named Parker. I feel Dorothy would have been pleased. She had a black poodle named cliche because it was so cliche for an old lady living in NYC to have a black poodle.
Betty
Lots of good books and more in the comments. Let the Great World Spin is one of my favorites, and a new one out is City on Fire, but I haven’t had the courage to tackle the 927 pages yet.
My husband and I are going to NYC for the first time at the end of June. We will be in and around Yonkers and also lower Manhattan. If you could list 2 or 3 bookstores and 2 or 3 cafes or reataurants that you love I would add them to my list. Also, can you remind me of that AirBnB that you have written about before? Thanks so much! Thanks for sharing.