Reading List
Fran Lebowitz
Writer and Humorist
Fran Lebowitz published Metropolitan Life in 1978 and Social Studies in 1981, two collections of essays that established a voice, flatly declarative and comically severe, and then stopped. The writer’s block that followed has lasted decades and become part of the act; she has described it without much apparent distress in interviews ever since.
She began at Andy Warhol’s Interview, writing a column while working as a taxi driver, and has since made most of her living from public speaking. Martin Scorsese has filmed her twice, in Public Speaking and the Netflix series Pretend It’s a City. She has lived in Manhattan since she was nineteen, owns thousands of books, and does not own a computer.
Cheap Novelties
by Ben Katchor
“It is not a mandarin sensibility, but it is piercingly intelligent and observant. If you read this book, or any of his books, you are going to get a view of New York that is not available anywhere else. Katchor might be galaxies away from Howard Moss or Jimmy McCourt or Dawn Powell or Dorothy Parker but there were and there are numerous authentic versions of New York.” — via Interview, September 2011
Instant Lives And More
by Howard Moss
“And the More is a piece that I think is the funniest thing published in my lifetime. It is a parody of one of Ned Rorem’s diaries – Ned Rorem is a composer who published, over many decades, his diaries. It would be helpful if you’ve read the Ned Rorem diaries, but it’s not essential. Howard Moss, the poet, the professor and the poetry editor of The New Yorker for many years, published this piece in the early 70s.” — Source
Queer Street
Rise and Fall of an American Culture, 1947-1985
by James McCourt
“James McCourt is a writer I adore. There is not a note of an opera, a frame of a movie, a page of a book that he hasn’t heard, seen or read in 50 languages. This is the only non-fiction he ever wrote. It’s a book you have to read to understand. I’ll do my best, but it’s hard to describe. When this book came out, it was badly, albeit favourably, reviewed in The New York Times. It was totally misunderstood.” — Source
The Diaries of Dawn Powell
1931-1965
by Dawn Powell
“If you had asked me to choose New York novels, I would have had a very rough time choosing among hers. They are spectacularly good. She wrote two sets of books. One whole group of her novels is set in Ohio, where she’s from – they are also excellent. But the New York ones are funnier, they’re basically satires. You should read Dawn Powell’s novels and then read her diaries, or vice versa, it doesn’t really matter.” — Source
The Portable Dorothy Parker
by Dorothy Parker
“Dorothy Parker wrote many kinds of things – short stories, book reviews and poetry. Not the kind of poetry people think of, not John Donne – she wrote light-hearted poems, she wrote theatre reviews, she wrote for The New Yorker. She was most known for being part of a group that was called the Algonquin Round Table – a group of writers that hung around the Algonquin Hotel who were known for being very witty.” — Source