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Alison Stewart: This is All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. About a week ago, one of our new colleagues here at New York Public Radio went on the slack to crowdsource any recommendations for books about New York's political scene and/or general history for recent transplants. She got dozens of replies in less than an hour, suggestions like Fear City by Kim Phillips Fein, and Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin.

Of course, one of the first titles to be recommended was The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York. It's the Pulitzer Prize-winning biography by Robert Caro and it's practically required reading for anyone who wants to understand how one unelected man wielded power to shape New York City's built environment. Now, for years, writers have strived to capture the essence of New York City in words. However, it really is impossible task for a single piece of literature or non-fiction to accomplish.

Today, we are spotlighting some of the most significant books written about or set in New York City. To offer more suggestions for titles, we have a historian and curator from the New York Public Library. Julie Golia is the associate director of manuscripts, archives, and rare books, and the Charles J. Liebman curator of manuscripts. Julie, welcome to All Of It.

Julie Golia: Hi, Alison. Thanks for having me.

Alison Stewart: Listeners, we would love for you to share some of your suggestions as well. Let's crowdsource a reading list. What is your favorite book about or set in New York City? Maybe it's fiction or maybe history about a particular time in the city or a particular person. What book do you recommend when someone wants to understand New York? Give us a call, 212-433-WNYC. That's 212-433-9692.

You can also reach out to us on social media @allofitwnyc, that is both Twitter and Instagram. It could be a biography or could be a book about New York's forgotten storefronts, maybe a great novel that captures a slice or a time in the city. 212-433-9692, 212-433-WNYC, maybe a children's book as well. Eloise, anybody? 212-433-9692, 212-433-WNYC. Julie, when it comes to writing a book about New York or where New York is a featured set piece, what does a book about New York or set in New York need to have to feel authentic?

Julie Golia: This is such a great question. I've been thinking about it a lot, and I think that what draws so many people to New York, whether in person or in literature, is the specificity of place, being able to describe the streets where people are walking or the stores or the neighbors or the communities that live in these places.

There's a sense, and I know this is a very complicated concept sometimes, but a sense of authenticity to some of our favorite books that just can't be faked. Do you know what I mean? You just get the sense that you are right there on the ground with them. I think one thing that makes it so wonderful is there are countless New Yorks, and so there are so many different specificities of place that have been written about and still so many that are waiting to be written.

Alison Stewart: One of my favorites is the The Alienist, Caleb Carr.

Julie Golia: Oh, love it.

Alison Stewart: It's so great. You can walk around with it and walk around Gramercy Park, you can go find, I think it was 880 Broadway still exists. It's so much fun.

Julie Golia: Go check out the Manhattan Bridge, think about hanging off the Manhattan Bridge. I also love that book, and I always recommended it to people who are interested in historical fiction on the city because the story there is so rich. It incorporates real people like Teddy Roosevelt, for example. You're right, the detail of place, it shows such a diligence on the part of Caleb Carr. You get such a sense of the strength of the research there.

Alison Stewart: If someone is brand new, a newcomer to New York, and comes to you and says, "Julie, what's a book I should read? I'm brand new."

Julie Golia: It depends on the person [laughs] because there are lots of different answers to that question, but if the person is saying, "I'm a historian," so the person is saying, "I want to understand this place that I live in, and I want to understand why it is so epic," I'll point them to what we historians sometimes call The Bible, which is Gotham. This is a truly epic history of New York City from pre-contact Lenape history. It gives, I think, a real depth and attention to that pre-contact Lenape history all the way up to 1898, which our history, buff snow is this moment when Greater New York is founded when all the five boroughs come together. There's so much there.

I think, earlier, I was talking about the specificity of place, but there's also something to understanding it on a big scale where New York fits in the global history and how it came to be the place that we understand it today. I've seen so many people carrying around that giant tome of a book because it's that good of a read. I actually once had a research assistant who took the book and ripped it in half [laughs] because he didn't want to carry it around because it was so big, and so he read the first half and the second half so he wouldn't have to carry around that big heavy book.

Alison Stewart: It's about 1,400 pages or so.

Julie Golia: Get it on your Kindle.

Alison Stewart: Let's take a call. Let's talk to Peter from Jersey City. Hey, Peter, thanks for calling All Of It.

Peter: Hi. I would like to recommend a great novel Paul Goodman's Empire City. I don't remember when it was written. It probably covers the '50s and '60s, maybe a little earlier, and it's a beautiful portrait of the city, sort of like E.B White if he had written an epic novel and not just a brilliant essay.

Alison Stewart: Thank you for calling in, Peter. You were nodding, Julie.

Julie Golia: I read that ages ago, but it actually did put to mind a couple books that I love that capture that same period written by people who are just walking around in the city, and one of those, of course, is E.B White's Here is New York, which is such a delicious homage to the city. Then another, which is a little grittier, is Alfred Kazin's A Walker in the City. I think there's a really wonderful subgenre of planners, people who walk the city and talk about the city. I think even just that, to be able to read and then walk with the person in both those cases, the people who are no longer alive, I think, is a really special experience.

Alison Stewart: Let's talk to Sally from the Upper West Side since the name E.B White has come up. Hi, Sally.

Sally: Yes. My favorite New York City book is Stuart Little. I read it when I was about eight years old and knew that I was going to come to New York as soon as I got through college. I read it maybe every 10 years. It works for an adult as well as a child. Obviously, it's about a particular period, but it's a combination of fantasy, but also the reality. When I first came here, the first thing I did was go to the sailboat pond because that's where Stuart Little's adventures began. I would also recommend as a novel, Duplicate Keys, I'm trying to remember, it's the artist, very popular, and I'm doing a blank on her last name.

Alison Stewart: We'll Google right now. We'll do the Googling for you. Go ahead.

Sally: Okay. It's about an Upper West Side neighborhood trying to solve a robbery with a group of people who have given the keys to their apartment to so many different people, and since I had done that myself, I really loved reading that book.

Alison Stewart: Thank you for calling in. That's Jane Smiley, by the way, is the author of Duplicate Keys. Oh, Edson's calling in from Manhattan. I was pretty sure someone was going to call with this book, and it's you, Edson, you're on the air.

Edson: Oh, thank you, Alison, for taking my call. Yes, Bonfire of Vanities by Tom Wolfe, and I read the book in 1990. I was just transplanted from Brazil, and the book was great showing inequality, wealth, and the racial apartheid over here in New York City because was really opened my mind regarding the apartheid, the racial divisions over here in New York, because, at the time, I didn't know.

If you take some trains like the sixth train on the east side, when you got to 960 Street, forget all the whites and upper middle class, you get off on 960 Street, and then the train, the car became brown and Black, and it was amazing. Also, the book talks about the lawyer--yes, I think it was the lawyer taking the D train all the way to the Bronx. I was fascinated with Tom Wolfe, Bonfire of Vanities.

And if you just allow me another book that I would recommend, it really shook me to the core was Malcolm X when he came to New York. Mm-hmm. he talks about living in the city, living in Harlem, and so depicted the city very, very well. Those are two books that I really recommend if you really want to know about New York City.

Alison Stewart: Edson, thank you so much for calling in. We're going to get to some more calls in a moment. I want to check back in with our guest, Julie Golia, historian, curator, and author from the New York Public Library. We're talking about books that tell us about New York. I think Edson's commentary was so interesting because so many-- how can I put this?

There are themes that change over time. The Bonfire of the Vanities was very '80s, as I remember. I'm curious if you have any books that you can think about that you could recommend that really capture a time and a moment, not just a specificity of the city and its environment and the grid, but actually a moment.

Julie Golia: Well, first, I have to say I was nodding vigorously as he tells The Bonfire of the Vanities. It captures such a moment in New York's history. It was written in 1987 by Tom Wolfe, height of the capitalist '80s, right? I will give a quick plug that we hold Tom Wolfe's art papers here in our archives at the New York Public Library and have amazing drawn images of the handwritten manuscript that Wolfe made in our treasure's exhibition right now, but a book that I always think about when I think of The Bonfire of the Vanities in a contrast is The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton, because these are incredibly similar themes.

It's the height of capitalist excess but in a different century. It's about these careful social morays and slights that gives such a subtle sense of the way that life works in New York's upper crust. I'm just struck by reading those to people who are looking for things to read together. Read those two together and think about this city as the capital of capital and the way that it is played out over centuries.

Alison Stewart: Another book that you recommended, it's on your list, is Brown Girl, Brownstones, a classic story set in Brooklyn. Tell our listeners a little more about it.

Julie Golia: I'm a Brooklynite, and so this one is really special to me. This is actually the debut novel of author Paule Marshall, 1959, remarkable, beautiful, honest coming-of-age story of a young girl who her family is Bahamian immigrants who were settling in Central Brooklyn at the time. I think sometimes when we think of immigration, we forget, and Brooklyn doesn't let you forget how central Caribbean immigration was to Brooklyn in the early and mid-20th century.

It really is one of the great shaping cultural forces in Brooklyn and New York at the time. The book is about a movement of people, but it's also about a girl and the way that she grew up, and it's this wonderful combination of a portrait of a neighborhood, a portrait of a cultural group, and a portrait of an individual.

Alison Stewart: Let's talk to JP calling in from Garden City. Hi, JP. Thank you so much for calling in.

JP: Oh, thank you very much. I was going to recommend The Door-Man by Peter Wheelwright, the very recent book, actually, last year. I just saw a blurb on it in The New Yorker and sort of blends elements of fact and fiction told from the viewpoint of a mysterious doorman. I don't know if anyone's heard of that, but it's a great book.

Alison Stewart: Sounds intriguing. JP, thanks for calling in. Chris tweeted recently, The City We Became by N.K. Jemisin, brilliant city vibes that go deeper than physical and reveals the city's soul. We've got a couple people who have called in for that one. Let's talk to Lamore, calling in from Astoria. Hi, Lamore.

Lamore: Hi, how are you? Can you hear me?

Alison Stewart: I can. You're on the air.

Lamore: Oh, perfect. Yes. Great. I'm sorry. I always say that, and when I always hear people say that, and I wonder, yes, we can hear you. Now, I'm doing it. Whatever. The book I wanted to recommend is called Urban Appetites: Food & Culture in Nineteenth-Century New York. It's by Cindy Lobel.

What she does is she details in how New York became the food capital and the metropolis that it is. She opens up windows of conversation about the intersection of culture, politics, and the economics that transformed the 19th century and how New York became the trendsetter, if you will, as far as food culture is concerned. It's very, very interesting for food nerds or foods historian or armchair food historians. Really, really interesting book.

Alison Stewart: Lamore, thank you so much for calling in. I want to follow up on that with you, Julie. Another book about a cultural moment in New York City, Please Kill Me.

Julie Golia: An oral history of punk music. This is a really cool genre that I would encourage people to read. There's actually quite a few books about musicians and music culture written like this, which is where the author essentially interviews people who were there on the ground and inserts no narrative voice and simply cuts from interview to interview to interview.

Of course, you can imagine the sensory nature. That's what I loved about the recommendation of Cindy Lobel's book just now. The sensory experience of punk music in the 1970s and the culture that came out of it and the real impact that it had on so many people's lives. It's just a heck of a good story. People will tear through that one.

Alison Stewart: Let's talk to Joy, calling in from Princeton Junction, New Jersey. Hi, Joy, thanks for calling in.

Joy: Oh, you're welcome. I'm calling to recommend an old book that I just finished, The Brooklyn Bridge by David McCullough. I think it was his first book. He wrote it in 1971, I think it was published. It was awesome. The first thing that it did for me was open my eyes to something that you take for granted today and what a monumental accomplishment it was in the 1870s, I think when they started it.

It just blew me away. The technological advances where they were just engineering feet of just not knowing if it was really going to work, and it worked in terms of the materials and the engineering and also the politics of the time, the corruption, and very specific time post-Civil War and the parallels to politics today and corruption just blew me away.

Alison Stewart: Joy, thank you for calling in. Julie, can you think of another book that's about a piece of infrastructure or about the infrastructure of New York City that would really be revealing?

Julie Golia: Well, I do love books that are about institutions, and of course, The Brooklyn Bridge is a kind of an institution. Completely agree with that recommendation. That book is epic. We know the bridge got built, but when you're reading it, you're like, "Is it going to get built?" It's pretty amazing.

My favorite institution story is another young adult book, From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler. Somebody mentioned earlier that Stuart Little made them move to New York. This is probably the book that made me move to New York. This is the story about a brother and sister who run away to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

I especially love it because they have a little foray to the Donnell Library, so the New York Public Library gets a little representation there, but it is such a beautiful homage to a place that, and it was written in the '60s, and you go there, you could still see the bed that they slept in and the fountain that they gathered coins so that they could wash their clothes. It is so magical and yet so real at the same time.

Alison Stewart: Let's talk to Claire from the West Village. Hi, Claire, thanks for calling All of It.

Claire: Hi. Thank you so much for having me. I wanted to recommend a book called The Mediterranean Runs Through Brooklyn. It's a book by Anthony Valerio, and it speaks to the Italian American experience in New York and a little bit of the immigrant experience, but it follows a couple of families specifically in Brooklyn from the 1920s to the 1980s, and it's very beautifully written.

It gets into the family dynamics, the complexities of the family, the food, the smells, the problems, the drama. It's just beautiful. It just captures a moment in time in New York when Italians came to New York and settled here and raised their families, and it's just very beautifully written, The Mediterranean Runs Through Brooklyn.

Alison Stewart: Claire, thanks for calling in. Kevin from Morristown, New Jersey. Kevin, what's your recommendation?

Kevin: Hey, how you doing, Alison? I actually really quickly an older book, 50 years old or whatnot, E. L. Doctorow's Ragtime. I read it when I was about 21 and it kind of blew me away with the political intrigue in New York and just the real separation of Blacks and whites in the city that we never really, at that time, didn't think of in terms of it relating back even previous to that and just the dramatic way that that kind of evolved.

Two more recent ones by Colson Whitehead, one of them, which kind of takes place in the same area as the E. L. Doctorow book, Harlem Shuffle, which is hysterical, but it really gives you the whole vibe and the whole feeling. The book's got a real personality.

Alison Stewart: Sure does.

Kevin: Then a departure for him, Colson Whitehead again, which is I think a rarely-read book of his, but Zone One, which-

Alison Stewart: Oh, the zombie book.

Kevin: -takes place-- yes.

Alison Stewart: Kevin, I got to dive in because we're going to run up against a wall. I just wanted to say someone else said Forever by Pete Hamel. Thank you for calling in, Kevin. Truman Capote's Breakfast at Tiffany's. Just want to get a few more in here, Golden Hill by Francis Spufford, a novel about Manhattan in 1746. Julie, in our last minute, what else would you recommend?

Julie Golia: I think two. You mentioned Truman Capote. One of my favorite, hard to say favorite, but probably one of my favorite books by Capote is this tiny little book called A House on the Heights, which is 50 pages long and is a glimpse into Bohemia and Brooklyn Heights in the 1950s. Everybody should read it with a martini in hand looking at the East River. Then another one, I will say, and not just as a historian but as a mom, is Faith Ringgold's Tar Beach, one of the most beautiful children's books maybe ever [laughs] and such a beautiful homage to the infrastructure, the magical infrastructure of New York City.

Alison Stewart: William from Morristown said The Bequest by Nicolette Glendon. Let's see, Jackie from Queens, Time and Again by Jack Finney. So many great recommendations from our listeners as well as from Julie Golia. She's a historian, curator, and author, and educator from the New York Public Library. I think we could do this again, Julie, so maybe we'll call you back.

Julie Golia: I have a lot of reading to do.

Alison Stewart: [laughs] Thanks so much.

Julie Golia: Thank you.

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