“My New York was already the New York that had replaced someone else’s.”
Catherine Lacey
New York
New York City is sprawling, filthy, noisy, expensive, utterly indifferent, and universally romanticized. It has convinced generation after generation of dreamers to hitch their fantasies to its possibility and grandeur— the consummate American success story.
But what’s it like to actually live there?
In this playful, perceptive guide to the place’s mythology and mundanities alike, celebrated novelist Catherine Lacey brings her signature clarity to a place that thrives on attention but resists easy understanding. Her New York moves through neighborhoods and among landmarks, exploring the city and its peculiar social grammar: how complaining breeds intimacy, how eccentricity ages into charm, and why leaving is rarely as simple as it seems.
Sharp and intimate, Lacey’s New York is attuned to the many ways the city is lived, imagined, and performed: a clear- yed valentine to a place continually made and remade by the people who move through it every day.
Catherine Lacey is the author of several acclaimed works of fiction and nonfiction, including The Möbius Book and Biography of X, named a best book of the year by The New Yorker and The New York Times. She was named one of Granta’s best young American novelists in 2017. Her writing explores identity, culture, and the structures that shape modern life. She was born in Mississippi and moved to New York in 2007.
Travel with a Writer
The Walking Tree’s global literary travel series presents places with a combination of dynamic storytelling, insightful observation, cultural references, and curated itineraries.
Written by acclaimed authors who know their subject intimately, these books give even armchair tourists a local’s understanding of the place: its rhythms, its customs, its contradictions, and the thousands of everyday details that make it tick.
Place by place, a global literary atlas takes shape.
- PUB DATE September 29, 2026
- Original paperback with flaps
- Page count: 128
- Print: $18.95 – 9782919841004
- Ebook: $9.95 – 9782919841226
