"How the Other Half Lives is a riveting account of life in New York's Lower East Side tenements of the last century written by one of the Progressive Era's preeminent reformers. Drawn from the author's long career as a police reporter and photographer, the book captures the stark realities of life for the destitute and represents one man's campaign to reform society by challenging the social injustices of his times. First published in 1890, the book...

This warm and funny tale of an earnest preppy editor finding himself trapped behind the counter of a Brooklyn convenience store is about family, culture and identity in an age of discombobulation. It starts with a gift, when Ben Ryder Howe's wife, the daughter of Korean immigrants, decides to repay her parents' self-sacrifice by buying them a store. Howe, an editor at the rarefied Paris Review, agrees to go along. Things soon become a lot more complicated....

"From the co-director of the Endangered Language Alliance, a captivating portrait of contemporary New York City through six speakers of little-known and overlooked languages, diving into the incredible history of the most linguistically diverse place ever to have existed on the planet. Half of all 7,000-plus human languages may disappear over the next century and-because many have never been recorded-when they're gone, it will be forever. Ross Perlin,...

From paddy wagon to rush hour, New York City has given us a number of our popular words and phrases, along the way fashioning a recognizable dialect all its own. Often imitated and just as often ridiculed, New York English has its own identity, imbued with the rich cultural history of (as New Yorkers tell it) the greatest city in the world. How did this unique language community develop, and how has it shaped the city as we know it today? In You Talkin'...

"More than forty-five million Americans attempt to survive under the poverty line, day by day. Nearly 60,000 people sleep in New York City-run shelters every night--forty percent of them children. This Is All I Got makes this issue deeply personal, vividly depicting one woman's hope and despair and her steadfast determination to improve her situation, despite the myriad setbacks she encounters. Camila is a twenty-two-year-old new mother. She has no...

New York is the greatest restaurant city the world has ever seen. In Appetite City, the former New York Times restaurant critic William Grimes leads us on a grand historical tour of New York's dining culture. Beginning with the era when simple chophouses and oyster bars dominated the culinary scene, he charts the city's transformation into the world restaurant capital it is today. Appetite City takes us on a unique and delectable journey, from the...

An executive sous chef who has worked alongside cooks from some of the nation's leading restaurants documents an intense twenty-four-hour period that illuminates the allures and adversities of a professional culinary life.

Chronicles America's complicated perceptions of race and crime through the story of the Central Park 5-a group of minority teenagers wrongfully convicted of brutally raping a white woman in New York.