Capital: New York, Capital of the 20th CenturyPaperback, 17 May 2016

Acclaimed artist Kenneth Goldsmith's thousand-page homage to New York City

Here is a kaleidoscopic assemblage and poetic history of New York: an unparalleled and original homage to the city, composed entirely of quotations. Drawn from a huge array of sources--histories, memoirs, newspaper articles, novels, government documents, emails--and organized into interpretive categories that reveal the philosophical architecture of the city, Capital is the ne plus ultra of books on the ultimate megalopolis.

It is also a book of experimental literature that transposes Walter Benjamin's unfinished magnum opus of literary montage on the modern city, The Arcades Project, from nineteenth-century Paris to twentieth-century New York, bringing the streets and its inhabitants to life in categories such as "Sex," "Central Park," "Commodity," "Loneliness," "Gentrification," "Advertising," and "Mapplethorpe."

Capital is a book designed to fascinate and to fail--for can a megalopolis truly ever be captured in words? Can a history, no matter how extensive, ever be comprehensive? Each reading of this book, and of New York, is a unique and impossible project.