Books about Brooklyn
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Of the ten or so novels that I've read since I began this project, Homage to Blenholt is certainly the most regional and the most "Jewish." It is positively marinated in local color. Even in the first few paragraphs, we encounter the "dirty cobbled streets" of Williamsburg, a milkman's plodding horse, the subway and the…
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Jonathan Lethem nominally sets Motherless Brooklyn in downtown Brooklyn, but it's more accurate to say that it takes place in the world of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler and Elmore Leonard. Or, to be even more precise, in the Land of Noir. It's a textbook example of superior detective fiction, with all the trappings: a…
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I read the first fifty pages of Hubert Selby's Last Exit to Brooklyn and then decided, No More. It's an ugly, brutal book, not one that's going to offer me either instruction or pleasure. I read two chapters — the first about the murderous gang wars and the second the transsexual who dies of an overdose…
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Daniel Fuchs was known to me only as the writer of the screenplay of Criss-Cross, a noir that epitomizes "gritty." Or perhaps grimy. I was not aware that Fuchs began his writing career with three Brooklyn novels, the first of which is Summer in Williamsburg. It's a novel that hits home, because Fuchs was born in 1909…
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Paula Fox's Desperate Characters feels to me less like a novel than a short story, or perhaps a set of short stories sutured together. It's comprised of a series of incidents that concern a married couple and like many fictions in the short story genre, resists closure or resolution. Though it's a miniature of a…
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Well, one might ask, how goes the reading-Brooklyn-novels project? I've been taken by surprise. Solely by the luck of the draw, just because the books were available at the public library, and without planning or intention on my part, my first three novels all had the same focus: coming-of-age-as-a-girl-in-Brooklyn. First, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn…
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I read, first with irritation but eventually with appreciation, Another Brooklyn, by Jacqueline Woodson. If I had purchased the book, rather than borrowing it from the Boulder Public, I'd be peeved, because it's more of a novella or long short story than a fully-grown novel. Only 165 pages of minibook size(8" x 5"), with spacious…
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My new reading project: novels set in Brooklyn. There are, I've already discovered, tons of them. I wonder how long I will last at this endeavor. Will it be a sterile or a fruitful exercise? How is it that I never read, until this very week, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn? It's certainly the best…
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During my Erasmus Hall High School years, the hottest of all "hot" books was Irving Shulman's The Amboy Dukes. It was official doctrine that a single oblique glance at the inflammatory cover of this paperback could transform a well-behaved kid into a murderous, reefer-crazed, oversexed hooligan. Simply to read about the "juvenile delinquents" who populate…