In the first twenty years of the twenty-first century, New York City has
been convulsed by terrorist attack, blackout, hurricane, recession,
social injustice, and pandemic. New Yorkers weaves the voices of some
of the city's best talkers into an indelible portrait of New York in our
time--and a powerful hymn to the vitality and resilience of its people.
Best-selling author Craig Taylor has been hailed as "a peerless
journalist and a beautiful craftsman" (David Rakoff), acclaimed for the
way he "fuses the mundane truth of conversation with the higher truth of
art" (Michel Faber). In the wake of his celebrated book Londoners,
Taylor moved to New York and spent years meeting regularly with hundreds
of New Yorkers as diverse as the city itself. New Yorkers features 75
of the most remarkable of them, their fascinating true tales arranged in
thematic sections that follow Taylor's growing engagement with the city.
Here are the uncelebrated people who propel New York each day--bodega
cashier, hospital nurse, elevator repairman, emergency dispatcher. Here
are those who wire the lights at the top of the Empire State Building,
clean the windows of Rockefeller Center, and keep the subway running.
Here are people whose experiences reflect the city's fractured
realities: the mother of a Latino teenager jailed at Rikers, a BLM
activist in the wake of police shootings. And here are those who capture
the ineffable feeling of New York, such as a balloon handler in the
Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade or a security guard at the Statue of
Liberty.
Vibrant and bursting with life, New Yorkers explores the nonstop
hustle to make it; the pressures on new immigrants, people of color, and
the poor; the constant battle between loving the city and wanting to
leave it; and the question of who gets to be considered a "New Yorker."
It captures the strength of an irrepressible city that--no matter what
it goes through--dares call itself the greatest in the world.
