Gift guide · 11 books

Gifts for New Yorkers

Books to give someone who lives here or misses it: essays, memoirs, novels, photographs and a guide.

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Memoir

Here Is New York (opens Bookshop.org)

E. B. White · 1949

White's short 1948 essay describes the city's crowds, solitude and vulnerability as he saw them, and its closing pages have been read differently since 2001.
Reporting

Up in the Old Hotel (opens Bookshop.org)

Joseph Mitchell · 1992

Mitchell's collected New Yorker profiles of fishmongers, bar owners, street preachers and other city characters, from the 1930s to the 1960s, in one volume.
Memoir

Downtown (opens Bookshop.org)

My Manhattan

Pete Hamill · 2004

Hamill, a newspaper columnist, walks lower Manhattan from the Battery to Greenwich Village, mixing memoir with the history of each place.
Memoir

Just Kids (opens Bookshop.org)

Patti Smith · 2010

Smith's memoir of her friendship with Robert Mapplethorpe in the New York of the late 1960s and 1970s, the Chelsea Hotel and the music scene. It won a National Book Award.
Fiction

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (opens Bookshop.org)

Betty Smith · 1943

Smith's novel of a poor Irish-American family in early twentieth-century Williamsburg, seen through a girl named Francie Nolan.
Fiction

The Bonfire of the Vanities (opens Bookshop.org)

Tom Wolfe · 1987

Wolfe's novel of 1980s New York centers on a Wall Street bond trader, a hit-and-run in the Bronx, and the courts, press and politicians around the case.
Fiction

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (opens Bookshop.org)

Michael Chabon · 2000

Two cousins create comic books in 1940s New York in Chabon's novel. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
Memoir

Notes of a Native Son (opens Bookshop.org)

James Baldwin · 1955

Baldwin's first essay collection includes his account of growing up in Harlem and the 1943 riot there.
The argument

The Death and Life of Great American Cities (opens Bookshop.org)

Jane Jacobs · 1961

Jacobs argues that dense, mixed-use streets with eyes on the sidewalk keep neighborhoods safe and lively, and she criticizes the urban renewal planning of her day.
Reference

Changing New York (opens Bookshop.org)

Berenice Abbott · 1939

Abbott's 1930s photographs for the Federal Art Project document the city's streets, shops and buildings as they were being rebuilt.
Practical guide

AIA Guide to New York City (opens Bookshop.org)

Norval White, Elliot Willensky and Fran Leadon · 2010

The fifth edition of the architecture guide describes and rates thousands of buildings borough by borough, with short notes on each.