The Sunken Cathedral

The Great Man

Kate Christensen · 312 pages

From the acclaimed author of The Epicure's Lament, a novel of literary rivalry in which two competing biographers collide in their quest for the truth about a great artist.Oscar Feldman, the "Great Man," was a New York city painter of the heroic generation of the forties and fifties. But instead of the abstract canvases of the Pollocks and Rothkos, he stubbornly hewed to painting one subject--the

Florence Gordon

Brian Morton · 320 pages

"Meet Florence Gordon: blunt, brilliant, cantankerous and passionate, feminist icon to young women, invisible and underappreciated by most everyone else. At seventy-five, Florence has earned her right to set down the burdens of family and work and shape her legacy at long last. But just as she is beginning to write her long-deferred memoir, her son Daniel returns to New York from Seattle with his

The Golem and the Jinni

Helene Wecker · 512 pages

In The Golem and the Jinni, a chance meeting between mythical beings takes readers on a dazzling journey through cultures in turn-of-the-century New York. Chava is a golem, a creature made of clay, brought to life to by a disgraced rabbi who dabbles in dark Kabbalistic magic and dies at sea on the voyage from Poland. Chava is unmoored and adrift as the ship arrives in New York harbor in 1899.

Mr. Sammler's Planet

Saul Bellow · 313 pages

"Sammler, a New Yorker in his seventies, a refugee from Nazism, a thinker of complex thoughts, a touchstone around whom a heterogeneous group revolves, is not simply the protagonist but the prime mover of a many-sided novel held together by the centripetal force of his presence. The counterpoint of personalities, subplots, and incidents constitutes a tragi-comic commentary on twentieth-century urb

The Brooklyn Follies

Paul Auster · 320 pages

Nathan Glass has come to Brooklyn to die. Divorced, estranged from his only daughter, the retired life insurance salesman seeks only solitude and anonymity. Then Nathan finds his long-lost nephew, Tom Wood, working in a local bookstore - a far cry from the brilliant academic career he'd begun when Nathan saw him last. Tom's boss is the charismatic Harry Brightman, whom fate has also brought to the

Thirteen Ways of Looking

Colum McCann · 264 pages

RL's Dream

Walter Mosley · 267 pages

RL's Dream is a novel about the blues - the blues as an expression of black poetry and black tragedy and how they sit in judgment on the American experience. In contemporary New York, aging bluesman Soupspoon Wise is alone, ill, and dying. He has played his music in a thousand bars, clubs, and juke joints, but never so memorably as the time he played with one Robert "RL" Johnson in the Mississippi

Heroic Measures

Jill Ciment

From the author of The Tattoo Artist ("Beautifully written"--Alice Sebold; "Boldly conceived"--The New York Times Book Review), a new novel--taut, moving, accomplished--set in a fraught, post-9/11 New York... about real estate, dog love, and a city on alert. A gasoline tanker truck is "stuck" in the Midtown Tunnel. New Yorkers are panicked . . . . Is this the next big attack? Alex, an artist, and

The Believers

Zoe Heller · 312 pages

When radical New York lawyer Joel Litvinoff is felled by a stroke, his wife, Audrey, uncovers a secret that forces her to reexamine everything she thought she knew about their forty-year marriage. Joel's children will soon have to come to terms with this discovery themselves, but for the meantime, they are struggling with their own dilemmas and doubts.Rosa, a disillusioned revolutionary, has found

A Life Force

Will Eisner · 139 pages

Chronicles the lives of ordinary people surviving the Great Depression in the Bronx, portraying the economic collapse, leftist politics, and rise in Nazism.

Exit Ghost

Philip Roth · 304 pages

After eleven years of solitude working on his New England mountain as a writer, Nathan Zuckerman returns to New York to confront a turbulent city in the wake of September 11, as well as the aging Amy Bellette, one-time muse to his first literary hero, E.I. Lonoff.

A Severed Wasp

Madeleine L'Engle · 388 pages

Katherine Forrester Vigneras, in a continuation of her story from The Small Rain, returns to New York City from Europe to retire. Now in her seventies, she encounters an old friend from her Greenwich Village days who, it turns out, is the former Bishop of New York. He asks Katherine to give a benefit concert at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. This leads to new demands on her resources--human

The History of Love

Nicole Krauss · 272 pages

Fourteen-year-old Alma Singer is trying to find a cure for her mother's loneliness. Believing that she might discover it in an old book her mother is lovingly translating, she sets out in search of its author. Across New York an old man named Leo Gursky is trying to survive a little bit longer. He spends his days dreaming of the lost love who, sixty years ago in Poland, inspired him to write a

The Fraud

Zadie Smith · 520 pages

Truth and justice tested by a 19th-century author and his cousin, and a fraudulent pretender and his manumitted witness.

The Museum of Modern Love

Heather Rose

The Street Sweeper

Elliot Perlman · 626 pages

"From the author of Seven Types of Ambiguity, an epic that reaches across generations and spans continents, revealing the interconnectedness and interdependence of humanity and the profound impact of memory on our lives"--

Ten Thousand Saints

Eleanor Henderson · 388 pages

This Beautiful Life

Helen Schulman · 222 pages

When the Bergamots move from a comfortable upstate college town to New York City, they are not quite sure how they will adapt, or what to make of the strange new world of well-to-do Manhattan. Soon, though, Richard is consumed by his executive role at a large New York university, and Liz, who has traded in her academic career to oversee the lives of their children, is hectically ferrying young Coc

The Rector of Justin

Louis Auchincloss · 346 pages

The founder of an Episcopalian secondary school is seen differently by members of his family and his associates.

Want Not

Jonathan Miles · 400 pages

On Thanksgiving Day a freegan couple living off the grid in Manhattan, a once prominent linguist struggling with midlife, and a New Jersey debt-collection magnate with a second chance at getting things right randomly and briefly collide as the weight of their desires ultimately undoes each of them, leaving them to pick up the pieces from what's left behind.

The Group

Mary McCarthy · 378 pages

THE GROUP follows eight graduates from exclusive Vassar College as they find love and heartbreak, forge careers, gossip and party in 1930s Manhattan. THE GROUP can be seen as the original SEX AND THE CITY. It is the first novel to frankly portray women's real lives, exploring subjects such as sex, contraception, motherhood and marriage.

A Fortunate Age

Joanna Smith Rakoff · 399 pages

A group of 1990s-era Oberlin graduates forge a friendship based on shared dreams, but find their camaraderie threatened by their youthful mistakes, their relationships with egocentric and insecure men, and the September 11 attacks.

The Submission

Amy Waldman · 299 pages

When Mohammad Khan, an American Muslim, is selected as the designer of a memorial for the victims of a terrorist attack on Manhattan, Claire Burwell, a woman widowed by the attack, becomes his fiercest defender. She soon comes under pressure from outraged family members and collides with hungry journalists, opportunistic politicians, and even Khan himself.

Closing Time

Joseph Heller · 464 pages

In a novel as darkly comic and audaciously ambitious as was Catch-22, Joseph Heller has dared to write the sequel to his American classic, using many of Catch-22's characters, now older if not wiser, to deftly satirize the realities and the myths of America in the half century since they fought World War II. In 1961, Joseph Heller's remarkable first novel made its way immediately into the America