Literary Landscapes: New York

A beautiful photographic stroll around the bookshops, restaurants, literary locations and authors’ neighbourhoods in the Big Apple.

Literary Landscapes: New York is the follow-up to Literary Landscapes: Paris and contains a familiar blend of everything precious to the bibliophile – a blend of quirky bookstores, authors’ favourite bars, grand libraries, storied hotels, on- and off-Broadway theatres, New York residences, and literary locations.

For beloved bookstores there is the Argosy, dating to 1925 and the oldest in Manhattan, Three Lives & Company in West Village, The Strand in East Village, The Corner Bookstore on the Upper East Side, the Alabaster Bookshop, and, stretching across to Brooklyn, the Greenlight Bookstore.

LL:NYC takes you inside restaurants and bars like Sardi’s – birthplace of the Tony Award; the Algonquin Hotel, and the White Horse Tavern, where Dylan Thomas spent his last night out in the Big Apple.

When it comes to hotels, The Plaza appears in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, but it is the Chelsea Hotel that has the most literary resonance. Mark Twain stayed there, Arthur Miller wrote there, as did Arthur C. Clarke and Simone de Beauvoir.

Literary locations are aplenty in New York – from Breakfast at Tiffany’s by Truman Capote to Washington Square by Henry James.

The book takes a short trip up Long Island to visit Walt Whitman’s birthplace, and while nothing but plaques remain of the New York homes that Herman Melville knew, we visit the literary giants buried alongside Melville in Woodlawn Cemetery.

All these chapters are interspersed with telling quotes about the city that never sleeps.