Ghosts of New York

Jim Lewis

* A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR*
"Awondrous novel, with prose that sparkles like certain sidewalks after rain....That's it, I thought. That's exactly what it's like to live in New York." — New York Times Book Review Ghosts of New York is a novel in which the laws of time and space have been subtly suspended. It interweaves four strands: a photographer newly returned to the neighborhood where she grew up, after years spent living overseas; a foundling raised on 14th Street; a graduate student, his romantic partner, and his best friend entangled in a set of relationships with far-reaching personal and political repercussions; and a shopkeeper suffering from first love late in life. Mixing prophecy, history, and a hint of speculative fiction, its stories are bound together even as they are propelled into stranger territory. And undergirding it all is a song, which appears, disappears, and then resurfaces. Ghosts of New York explores complex lives through indelible renderings of settings—a bar, a night market, a recording studio—that alternate between familiar and unsettling. The work of a celebrated novelist and veteran of the art, film, and music scenes in New York and Austin (described as "a rare talent" by the New York Times and "a powerful literary voice" by Jeffrey Eugenides), this novel will immediately absorb readers intrigued by creative people and the places that sustain and challenge them.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• The New Love
• The Big Rock Candy Mountain
• Silver and Gold
• The River, Part One
• Unto Us Lowliest Sometime Sweep
• The Lion of Stuyvesant
• Honey and Ashes
• Available Night
• Benny Russell, Standing on the Edge of the Brooklyn Bridge, Contemplates Self-Murder and Reflects on the Events That Brought Him There
• Ghosts of New York: A Partial Account
• Johnny and Bridget
• The Late Hour
• A Dead Soldier
• The Winter Market
• Sur LA Table
• Lisa
• An Affliction
• Capitalism
• The Original
• The River, Part Two
• The Great Apostle of Charity
• Cascading Failure
• The City Psalms