Up in the Old Hotel by Joseph Mitchell. I finished it yesterday.
It's a collection of articles the author wrote for The New Yorker around the middle of the last century. The stories are portraits of weird, eccentric people and peculiar places in and around New York. Mitchell describes his subjects with dignity, without putting them on a pedestal.
The author is a very good writer and his stories are enjoyable, but only after I had read the book to the last page, I understood what makes this book so great. The stories tell you as much about the author as they tell you about the protagonists. I started the book to get a glimpse of the old New York and finished the book with a great curiosity about the author himself.
It's a collection of articles the author wrote for The New Yorker around the middle of the last century. The stories are portraits of weird, eccentric people and peculiar places in and around New York. Mitchell describes his subjects with dignity, without putting them on a pedestal.
The author is a very good writer and his stories are enjoyable, but only after I had read the book to the last page, I understood what makes this book so great. The stories tell you as much about the author as they tell you about the protagonists. I started the book to get a glimpse of the old New York and finished the book with a great curiosity about the author himself.