Here are 100 books that Five Points fans have personally recommended if you like
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I write and teach about nineteenth-century US history, and I am interested in immigration for both personal and professional reasons. A native of Dublin, Ireland, I did my undergraduate work in Edinburgh, Scotland, completed my graduate degree in New York City, moved to Austin, Texas for my first academic job and to Boston for my second job, and then returned to New City York to take up my current position at NYU, where I teach US immigration history and run Glucksman Ireland House. The key themes in my work—migration, diaspora, and empire—have been as central to my life journey as to my research and teaching.
Thoroughly researched, elegantly written, and deeply humane, Expelling the Poor shows how poverty—and Irish poverty in particular—shaped American immigration policy.
Until the late nineteenth century, Hidetaka Hirota demonstrates, individual states and cities controlled their own borders. They regulated, taxed, excluded, and removed the Irish poor, thereby laying the groundwork for the national policy that emerged in the 1880s.
By examining the impact of nativist sentiment, Hirota reveals how policies directed at the Irish-born poor, alongside the exclusion of Chinese laborers, explain the origins of immigration policy in the United States.
Expelling the Poor examines the origins of immigration restriction in the United States, especially deportation policy. Based on an analysis of immigration policies in major American coastal states, including New York, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Louisiana, and California, it provides the first sustained study of immigration control conducted by states prior to the introduction of federal immigration law in the late nineteenth century. The influx of impoverished Irish immigrants over the first half of the nineteenth century led nativists in New York and Massachusetts to develop policies for prohibiting the landing of destitute foreigners and deporting those already resident in the…
I write and teach about nineteenth-century US history, and I am interested in immigration for both personal and professional reasons. A native of Dublin, Ireland, I did my undergraduate work in Edinburgh, Scotland, completed my graduate degree in New York City, moved to Austin, Texas for my first academic job and to Boston for my second job, and then returned to New City York to take up my current position at NYU, where I teach US immigration history and run Glucksman Ireland House. The key themes in my work—migration, diaspora, and empire—have been as central to my life journey as to my research and teaching.
Moral Contagion tells the shocking story of the Seamen Acts, under which free Black sailors were imprisoned during their stay in southern ports during the antebellum era.
At least 20,000 free Black maritime workers, mostly from Britain and northern US states, were confined—and an unknown number, abandoned by their captains, were sold into slavery. The presence of free Black people in the South—widely feared as a source of “moral contagion”—contradicted the logic of slavery and threatened the very survival of that institution.
Why do I include this book on a list about US immigration history in the nineteenth century? Because, as Michael Schoeppner powerfully demonstrates, that history cannot be understood without considering the laws and policies controlling the movement of Black people in a slaveholding republic.
Between 1822 and 1857, eight Southern states barred the ingress of all free black maritime workers. According to lawmakers, they carried a 'moral contagion' of abolitionism and black autonomy that could be transmitted to local slaves. Those seamen who arrived in Southern ports in violation of the laws faced incarceration, corporal punishment, an incipient form of convict leasing, and even punitive enslavement. The sailors, their captains, abolitionists, and British diplomatic agents protested this treatment. They wrote letters, published tracts, cajoled elected officials, pleaded with Southern officials, and litigated in state and federal courts. By deploying a progressive and sweeping notion…
I write and teach about nineteenth-century US history, and I am interested in immigration for both personal and professional reasons. A native of Dublin, Ireland, I did my undergraduate work in Edinburgh, Scotland, completed my graduate degree in New York City, moved to Austin, Texas for my first academic job and to Boston for my second job, and then returned to New City York to take up my current position at NYU, where I teach US immigration history and run Glucksman Ireland House. The key themes in my work—migration, diaspora, and empire—have been as central to my life journey as to my research and teaching.
Why did anti-Chinese violence continue to rise even after the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, reaching a terrible peak in 1885 and 1886?
In a powerful reinterpretation of Chinese exclusion, Beth Lew-Williams reveals how the 1882 act was deliberately limited in scope, poorly funded, and loosely enforced—because immigration policy at this time was still governed by diplomacy. Only in the late 1880s, with China perceived as weak, did the US unilaterally abrogate its treaty obligations and move toward outright exclusion.
The chronology really matters here: for Chinese immigrants it was a question not just of entry or exclusion, but of life and death. Deftly situating anti-Chinese violence in overlapping regional, national, and international contexts, Lew Williams shows how the idea of the immigrant “alien” emerged in tandem with national citizenship during the era of the Civil War and Reconstruction.
Winner of the Ray Allen Billington Prize Winner of the Ellis W. Hawley Prize Winner of the Sally and Ken Owens Award Winner of the Vincent P. DeSantis Book Prize Winner of the Caroline Bancroft History Prize
"A powerful argument about racial violence that could not be more timely." -Richard White
"A riveting, beautifully written account...that foregrounds Chinese voices and experiences. A timely and important contribution to our understanding of immigration and the border." -Karl Jacoby, author of Shadows at Dawn
In 1885, following the massacre of Chinese miners in Wyoming Territory, communities throughout California and the Pacific Northwest harassed,…
I write and teach about nineteenth-century US history, and I am interested in immigration for both personal and professional reasons. A native of Dublin, Ireland, I did my undergraduate work in Edinburgh, Scotland, completed my graduate degree in New York City, moved to Austin, Texas for my first academic job and to Boston for my second job, and then returned to New City York to take up my current position at NYU, where I teach US immigration history and run Glucksman Ireland House. The key themes in my work—migration, diaspora, and empire—have been as central to my life journey as to my research and teaching.
Bridging the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in a sweeping, transnational history, Alien Nation provides a compelling account of Chinese migration to the Americas from the 1840s through World War II.
In vivid prose, Young tells the story of how Chinese laborers mined gold, built railroads, and harvested sugar cane; how anti-Chinese restrictionists demonized these workers as “coolies”; and how nationalist movements throughout the Americas enflamed anti-Chinese sentiment.
Alien Nation explains how different national governments borrowed from one other in crafting policies regulating and controlling Chinese immigration, but also how these policies clashed and diverged. Within this transnational framework, Elliott Young recovers the agency of Chinese migrants, facing exclusion, deportation, and segregation, who circumvented government policies to form vibrant communities that transcended national borders.
In this sweeping work, Elliott Young traces the pivotal century of Chinese migration to the Americas, beginning with the 1840s at the start of the "coolie" trade and ending during World War II. The Chinese came as laborers, streaming across borders legally and illegally and working jobs few others wanted, from constructing railroads in California to harvesting sugar cane in Cuba. Though nations were built in part from their labor, Young argues that they were the first group of migrants to bear the stigma of being "alien." Being neither black nor white and existing outside of the nineteenth century Western…
I’m fascinated by long stories where things aren’t exactly as they seem. Most crime fiction is secrets and lies and their eventual uncovering but most ‘literary’ fiction is too. For what it’s worth, I was a book reviewer for all the posh UK papers for about 15 years, including crime fiction critic for The Observer for twelve (so I’ve read far more crime novels than is healthy for anyone!). I’m a voracious reader and writer and I love making things more complicated for myself (and the reader) by coming up with stuff that I’ve then somehow got to fit together.
This is post-modern crime fiction thematically linked and all with increasingly unreliable characters—because they’re each going insane.
In City of Glass private investigator, Daniel Quinn, goes mad sinking deeper into an investigation about identity. Who is telling his story and can they be relied on? Is it any of these characters who appear: ‘the author,’ ‘Paul Auster the writer,’ ‘Paul Auster the detective’? Whoosh.
I love this stuff but understand it’s an acquired taste!
Paul Auster's signature work, "The New York Trilogy," consists of three interlocking novels: "City of Glass," "Ghosts," and "The Locked Room" - haunting and mysterious tales that move at the breathless pace of a thriller."City of Glass" - As a result of a strange phone call in the middle of the night, Quinn, a writer of detective stories, becomes enmeshed in a case more puzzling than any he might hace written"Ghosts"Blue, a student of Brown, has been hired to spy on Black. From a window of a rented house on Orange street, Blue stalks his subject, who is staring out…
I have always liked antiheroes and characters that are in some way doomed. To me, there’s something romantic about them. And over time I have come to replace the fictional protagonists of noir and horror with antiheroes from real life. With miserable authors who wrote about their own lives, where instead of gangsters or monsters, they waged battle against themselves, against their own demons and despair. Books like these have kept me company during some of the darkest periods of my life, and their unflinching honesty has inspired me to become a writer. Perhaps they can do the same for you.
It takes courage to name your book that. Especially in the 90s before self-publishing became a thing. Which did not stop its renegade author from selling xeroxed copies of it in the streets.
Its titular protagonist, who is jobless and homeless after his girlfriend kicks him out, is based on the author himself. He struggles with feelings of inadequacy and a sense of purposelessness. He works odd jobs, writes an occasional poem, meets eccentric strangers, engages in substance abuse, and gets into sticky situations on account of his bad decisions.
While I don’t know about you, I can strongly relate to the character. The book's dark humor is also enough to make it one of my favorites.
Arthur Nersesian's underground literary treasure is an unforgettable slice of gritty New York City life...and the darkly hilarious odyssey of an anonymous slacker. He's a perennial couch-surfer, an aspiring writer searching for himself, and he's just trying to survive. But life has other things in store for the fuck-up. From being dumped by his girlfriend to getting fired for asking for a raise, from falling into a robbery to posing as a gay man to keep his job at a porn theatre, the fuck-up's tragi-comedy is perfectly realised by Arthur Nersesian, who manages to create humour and suspense out of…
My father used to take me to watch the Twins play at Metropolitan Stadium in Bloomington, a twenty-minute drive from our house in suburban Minneapolis. As soon as the Twins announced their schedule each year, he would buy tickets for the doubleheaders. Our favorites were the twilight doubleheaders, when we watched one game by daylight, and the other under the night sky. Baseball was pure to me then: played outdoors on real grass. Seated beside my dad during those twin bills, I felt his love for the game seep into me and take root. All these years later, almost two decades after his death, that love remains strong.
I came of age in the seventies, and this book took me through that time, specifically 1977 again, able to view events through the lens of a particularly insightful adult.
This book encompasses more than baseball. There’s the battle to be mayor between Ed Koch and Mario Cuomo, Rupert Murdoch buying the New York Post, disco and dancing at Studio 54, the dawn of punk rock, but at its heart is the story of the Yankees and that crazy love triangle of Reggie Jackson, Billy Martin, and George Steinbrenner. I was delighted to relive all of that craziness.
“Masterful . . . In Mahler’s expert hands, the city’s outsized citizens are flawed, fierce, bickersome, and as indomitable as the metropolis itself.” —Mike Sokolove, author of The Ticket Out
A passionate and dramatic account of a year in the life of a city, when baseball and crime reigned supreme, and when several remarkable figures emerged to steer New York clear of one of its most harrowing periods.
By early 1977, the metropolis was in the grip of hysteria caused by a murderer dubbed “Son of Sam.” And on a sweltering night in July, a citywide power outage touched off…
My first book was Quiver, a collection of erotic short stories. I wrote it to immortalize the hedonism of Sydney in the 1990s, wanting to show a nonjudgmental, joyful side. The fact that it touched a lot of people compelled me to write two more collections Tremble and Yearn – each exploring different themes: Tremble is an erotic re-imagining of various root myths, whilst Yearn has more historical and fantastical elements. I interweave all the characters in the stories throughout the whole collections. Humor is also important to me when it comes to the ironies and emotions around sex, the other aspect is gender power play and all the sublime reversals that can encapsulate.
This collection of short stories is really about how sexual desire and social ambition can lead to all sorts of compromising and bizarre situations. I originally was drawn to it because I’d loved the filmSecretarybased on one of the short stories in the collection. I related to it because it is nearly all from a young female P.O.V – a kind of potpourri of trying to make it in NY in the 1980s. It's the perfect illustration of how powerful short story as a form can be in terms encapsulate an event, mood, and era – It also showed me how fictionalized memoir can be a good source of material and that if the book is really well-observed it never dates.
Mary Gaitskill's tales of desire and dislocation in 1980s New York caused a sensation with their frank, caustic portrayals of men and women's inner lives. As her characters have sex, try and fail to connect, play power games and inflict myriad cruelties on each other, she skewers urban life with precision and candour.
'Stubbornly original, with a sort of rhythm and fine moments that flatten you out when you don't expect it, these stories are a pleasure to read' Alice Munro
'An air of Pinteresque menace hangs over these people's social exchanges like black funereal bunting ... Gaitskill writes with…
I'm a “storyseeker” as much as a storyteller. I love hearing people’s ordinary and extraordinary stories; they inspire and motivate me and make me feel hopeful. I think our stories are the most precious things we have, and our greatest legacy. They help us understand each other better and connect us to people we may otherwise never get to meet. That’s why I wrote a book of personal stories called 30 Days: Stories of Gratitude, Traditions, and Wisdom and a 30 Days Journal that helps people record their own stories, by answering a prompt each day for a month. For a nonprofit I help lead called KindWorks, my title is CIO—Chief Inspiration Officer!
I have been hooked on reading the fascinating stories of ordinary people that Brandon Stanton captures in his Humans of New York social media posts since he started over a decade ago.
His posts reveal that every single person we pass on a daily basis has a story to tell, a challenge they’re facing or have overcome that we will never know; Brandon actually stops to ask them. It amazes me how in a few minutes he’s able to gain the trust of people so they feel comfortable to reveal the most vulnerable and intimate sides of themselves.
Brandon writes each story with honesty and respect and without judgment. And we all feel a little more connected and a little less alone.
With over 500 vibrant, full-color photos, Humans of New York: Stories is an insightful and inspiring collection of portraits of the lives of New Yorkers.
Humans of New York: Stories is the culmination of five years of innovative storytelling on the streets of New York City. During this time, photographer Brandon Stanton stopped, photographed, and interviewed more than ten thousand strangers, eventually sharing their stories on his blog, Humans of New York.
In Humans of New York: Stories, the interviews accompanying the photographs go deeper, exhibiting the intimate storytelling that the blog has become…
I moved to New York City right after college, hungry to escape from the homogeneity of a small New England town. I wanted nothing more than to be surrounded by people of all races and nations, languages, and walks of life, and to have easy access to some of the greatest cultural institutions of the world. New York can be hard and unforgiving, but there is no place like it. I love living here.
As much about ideas and the nature of friendship as it is about the city, this slim volume captures, better than any other I know, the visceral feel of living in New York. Fiercely independent, Gornick wanders the city’s streets in the “habit of loneliness,” ever watching, listening, and thinking. A child of working-class Jewish immigrants, she grew up in the Bronx in the 1940s and 1950s, and writes in a funny, smart, rueful, and tell-it-like-it-is voice that is unmistakably New York.
A contentious, deeply moving ode to friendship, love, and urban life in the spirit of Fierce Attachments
A memoir of self-discovery and the dilemma of connection in our time, The Odd Woman and the City explores the rhythms, chance encounters, and ever-changing friendships of urban life that forge the sensibility of a fiercely independent woman who has lived out her conflicts, not her fantasies, in a city (New York) that has done the same. Running steadily through the book is Vivian Gornick's exchange of more than twenty years with Leonard, a gay man who is sophisticated about his own unhappiness,…
