Woody Guthrie is acknowledged and lauded the world over for inspiring the likes of Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen and Joe Strummer. Originally from Oklahoma, he was a real musician playing music for the everyman, but if it wasn't for New York City he might not have given us his masterpiece 'This Land Is Your Land' among others. For the first time the city that Woody called home is brought to life in historical photographs, documents and previously unpublished lyrics. Like a scrapbook, it gathers all that helped make him the legend we celebrate today and the city in which it happened.
Woody Guthrie's prolific output popularized folk music in the 1940s and his presence in New York City helped spark the 1960s folk revival. My name is New York, I’m a brick on a brick I’m a hundred folks running, and ten dying sick I’m a saint, I’m a sinner, a whore and her pimp Your ocean’s the mirror I look in to primp. —“My Name Is New York,” Woody Guthrie Dust bowl troubadour Woody Guthrie first arrived in New York City on February 16, 1940. Although he continued to ramble, for 27 years— from 1940 until his death in 1967—New York was the city he called home and always returned to. For the first time, this wonderful New York story comes to life with historical photos, documents, and previously unpublished lyrics from the Woody Guthrie Archives. Highlighting 19 significant locations, this little guide provides an expansive yet intimate portrait of Woody Guthrie's NYC life. We invite you to walk the streets, ride the buses and subways, or sit down and relax on some of the stoops, park benches, or beaches where Woody Guthrie did—always strumming away on his guitar, always working on a new song. Many of Woody's most popular songs were written in apartments, lofts, and other locations around "New York Town." That song, along with "Jesus Christ," "Vigilante Man," "Hard Travelin'," "Tom Joad," "Reuben James," "All You Fascists Bound to Lose," and "1913 Massacre," are among the more than 600 he composed in the Big Apple. Most surprisingly, his iconic "This Land Is Your Land," was written at a small rooming house on 43rd Street and Sixth Avenue, on February 23, 1940 within a few days of his arrival. With new friends Pete Seeger, Lead Belly, Sonny Terry, and Brownie McGhee and the Almanac Singers he was at the center of a new movement—introducing and popularizing rural, roots, topical, and protest music to modern, urban audiences. For more information visit http://www.MyNameIsNY.com/
"A casually wondrous experience; it made me feel like the city was unfolding beneath my feet.” —Jia Tolentino, author of Trick Mirror In place-names lie stories. That’s the truth that animates this fascinating journey through the names of New York City’s streets and parks, boroughs and bridges, playgrounds and neighborhoods. Exploring the power of naming to shape experience and our sense of place, Joshua Jelly-Schapiro traces the ways in which native Lenape, Dutch settlers, British invaders, and successive waves of immigrants have left their marks on the city’s map. He excavates the roots of many names, from Brooklyn to Harlem, that have gained iconic meaning worldwide. He interviews the last living speakers of Lenape, visits the harbor’s forgotten islands, lingers on street corners named for ballplayers and saints, and meets linguists who study the estimated eight hundred languages now spoken in New York. As recent arrivals continue to find new ways to make New York’s neighborhoods their own, the names that stick to the city’s streets function not only as portals to explore the past but also as a means to reimagine what is possible now.
Frustrated by a day full of teachers and classmates mispronouncing her beautiful name, a little girl tells her mother she never wants to come back to school. In response, the girl's mother teaches her about the musicality of African, Asian, Black-American, Latinx, and Middle Eastern names on their lyrical walk home through the city. Empowered by this newfound understanding, the young girl is ready to return the next day to share her knowledge with her class. Your Name is a Song is a celebration to remind all of us about the beauty, history, and magic behind names.
Welcome to Ian Frazier's New York, a city more downtown than up, where every block is an event, and where the denizens are larger than life. Meet landlord extraordinaire Zvi Hugo Segal, and the man who climbed the World Trade Center, and an eighty-three-year-old typewriter repairman whose shop on Fulton Street has drawers full of umlauts. Learn the location of Manhattan's antipodes, and meander the length of Route 3 to New Jersey. Like his literary forbears Joseph Mitchell and A.J. Liebling, Frazier, in his bewitching, inimitable voice, makes us fall in love with America's greatest city all over again, the way he did, arriving as a young man from Hudson, Ohio. In classic evocations of the F train, Canal Street, and Prospect Park, Brooklyn, and in his iconic "Bags in Trees" essay, Frazier gives us New York again, in all its vital and human multiplicity.
On September 11, the world was made heartbreakingly aware of the risks taken by the New York City Fire Department. But the New York Daily News has been documenting their bravery since 1919. Now, culled from their archive of over 6 million images, this book represents more than eighty years of the FDNY in action: fighting fires, at rest in the station house, training, mourning, protesting and proudly posing for history. A tribute to the dedication, heroism and humanity of the thousands serving in NY, this book is illustrated with 120 colour and b/w photos.
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A simple hospital visit becomes a portal to the tender relationship between mother and daughter in this extraordinary novel by the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Olive Kitteridge and The Burgess Boys. Soon to be a Broadway play starring Laura Linney produced by Manhattan Theatre Club and London Theatre Company • LONGLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE • NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The Washington Post • The New York Times Book Review • NPR • BookPage • LibraryReads • Minneapolis Star Tribune • St. Louis Post-Dispatch Lucy Barton is recovering slowly from what should have been a simple operation. Her mother, to whom she hasn’t spoken for many years, comes to see her. Gentle gossip about people from Lucy’s childhood in Amgash, Illinois, seems to reconnect them, but just below the surface lie the tension and longing that have informed every aspect of Lucy’s life: her escape from her troubled family, her desire to become a writer, her marriage, her love for her two daughters. Knitting this powerful narrative together is the brilliant storytelling voice of Lucy herself: keenly observant, deeply human, and truly unforgettable. Praise for My Name Is Lucy Barton “A quiet, sublimely merciful contemporary novel about love, yearning, and resilience in a family damaged beyond words.”—The Boston Globe “It is Lucy’s gentle honesty, complex relationship with her husband, and nuanced response to her mother’s shortcomings that make this novel so subtly powerful.”—San Francisco Chronicle “A short novel about love, particularly the complicated love between mothers and daughters, but also simpler, more sudden bonds . . . It evokes these connections in a style so spare, so pure and so profound the book almost seems to be a kind of scripture or sutra, if a very down-to-earth and unpretentious one.”—Newsday “Spectacular . . . Smart and cagey in every way. It is both a book of withholdings and a book of great openness and wisdom. . . . [Strout] is in supreme and magnificent command of this novel at all times.”—Lily King, The Washington Post “An aching, illuminating look at mother-daughter devotion.”—People
Featured in a New York Times article titled "Teach Your Kids to Resist Hatred Toward Asians" A young boy wrestles with his Muslim identify until a compassionate teacher helps him to understand more about his heritage. After a family move, Bilal and his sister Ayesha attend a new school where they find out that they may be the only Muslim students there. Bilal sees his sister bullied on their first day, so he worries about being teased himself, thinking it might be best if his classmates didn't know that he is Muslim. Maybe if he tells kids his name is Bill, rather than Bilal, then they will eave him alone. But when Bilal's teacher Mr. Ali, who is also Muslim, sees how Bilal is struggling. He gives Bilal a book about the first person to give the call to prayer during the time of the Prophet Muhammad. That person was another Bilal: Bilal Ibn Rabah. What Bilal learns from the book forms the compelling story of a young boy grappling with his identity.
A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER "Know My Name is a gut-punch, and in the end, somehow, also blessedly hopeful." --Washington Post Universally acclaimed, rapturously reviewed, and an instant New York Times bestseller, Chanel Miller's breathtaking memoir "gives readers the privilege of knowing her not just as Emily Doe, but as Chanel Miller the writer, the artist, the survivor, the fighter." (The Wrap). Her story of trauma and transcendence illuminates a culture biased to protect perpetrators, indicting a criminal justice system designed to fail the most vulnerable, and, ultimately, shining with the courage required to move through suffering and live a full and beautiful life. Know My Name will forever transform the way we think about sexual assault, challenging our beliefs about what is acceptable and speaking truth to the tumultuous reality of healing. Entwining pain, resilience, and humor, this memoir will stand as a modern classic.
Winner of the Commonwealth Writers' Prize. "Wonderfully written...populated by vivid characters and rendered in fascinating detail." —Nancy Kline, New York Times Book Review Kidnapped from Africa as a child, Aminata Diallo is enslaved in South Carolina but escapes during the chaos of the Revolutionary War. In Manhattan she becomes a scribe for the British, recording the names of blacks who have served the King and earned their freedom in Nova Scotia. But the hardship and prejudice of the new colony prompt her to follow her heart back to Africa, then on to London, where she bears witness to the injustices of slavery and its toll on her life and a whole people. It is a story that no listener, and no reader, will ever forget. Published in Canada as The Book of Negroes and the basis for the award-winning BET miniseries of the same name.
