The best books about making it there from anywhere in New York City

The book is an engaging memoir about what it was like in the 1950s for a single woman just out of college to balance life and relationships while starting a career in magazine publishing in the Big Apple and follows her career and family relationships through to the 1970s.

Though things like finding an apartment in a trendy neighborhood back then were significantly easier than they are in modern day, the hilarious accounts about the challenges of adapting to small living conditions still ring true.

It’s an entertaining glimpse into the golden age of the print magazine industry, but it’s also a brutally honest account of women’s mental health issues, and what it’s like to seemingly have it all but still feel the constraints imposed by choosing to live in NYC. Any aspiring writer should read this book. 

This novel of interconnected stories is a fascinating snapshot of life in 1920s New York City.

Considering that it was written in 1925, Dos Pasos does an incredible job of representing different backgrounds and classes as they move through the city with one another. It shows how one can’t exist in such a setting on the highest levels of society without the help of people who make up the fabric of the rest of the town.

Encountering day-to-day strangers in the city won’t feel the same after reading this book. Plus, it takes place during Prohibition from a real time perspective, showing that the “Roaring Twenties” were more of a yelp.

New York City includes all five boroughs. When it was first published in the early 1990s, this creative book that weaves the stories of four Dominican sisters through the decades backwards from the 1980s to the 1960s was a real gamechanger.

It’s about a family that’s been taken down a few notches—having once lived as upper-class citizens with house servants in the Dominican Republic—as they adjust to New York City culture, and specifically, life in the 1960s and 1970s Bronx, and unpack the truth about their father’s reasons for relocating the family in the first place.

Part of the narrative also serves as a relatable coming-of-age story about teenage girls, their sisterhoods, and friendships. Think Judy Blume, but Dominican, with more house parties, food, and drinking. 

Immigrants have the biggest impact on what modern day New Yorkers eat.

This book tells the story of five families from different cultures—German, Irish, Russian (Prussian) Jewish, Lithuanian, and Italian—who at various times all lived at the same tenement on the Lower East Side in the late 19th and early 20th century. Their stories, and the ways their adopted culture evolved since immigrating to America, is told with an examination of the resourceful ways the families earned money, sourced, and shopped for food.

Recipes reveal how certain dishes born out of necessity became iconic staples of American cuisine (for instance, how and why corned beef is an Irish-American, not ethnically Irish dish). 

Although the book discusses the punk scene in other cities, most of it takes place in NYC’s East Village.

CBGBs, Blondie, the New York Dolls, Ramones, Patti Smith, Bebe Buell, Iggy Pop, the MC5, Andy Warhol, Lou Reed—their stories, their words, no safety pin out of place. So many of the people and places are gone now. The book serves as the greatest time capsule of a lost city culture.

The book is simultaneously horrifying and beautiful, and often just dang funny.