NYC in Fact and Fiction

Journalist Ada Calhoun has won numerous awards and fellowships, including the Patterson, Croly, and USC-Annenberg. She has also written popular essays, including several for the New York Times. In a narrative enriched by hundreds of interviews and dozens of rare images, St. Marks native Ada Calhoun presents a vibrant narrative history of three hallowed Manhattan blocks―the epicenter of American cool—in St. Marks Is Dead: The Many Lives of America's Hippest Street (W.W. Norton). Calhoun reveals that St. Marks has variously been an elite address, an immigrants’ haven, a mafia warzone, a hippie paradise, and a backdrop to the film Kids―but it has always been a place that outsiders call home.

Stacy Wakefield is best known for her seminal nonfiction book Not for Rent--one of the first to chronicle squatting in the modern era, and an underground classic. She is the co-creator, along with Nick Zinner of the band Yeah Yeah Yeahs,  and with writer Zachary Lipez, of the photo/essay book Please Take Me Off the Guest List. Her latest novel is The Sunshine Crust Baking Factory (Akashic Books). Sid arrives in New York City in 1995 eager to join the anarchist squatting scene. She’s got a tattoo, she listens to the right bands . . . so why would she get a job and rent some tiny shoe-box apartment when she could take over a whole building with a gang of wild young pirates? Sid teams up with a musician from Mexico and together they find their way to Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Packs of wild dogs roam the waterfront and the rough building in which they finally find space is occupied by misfits who don’t know anything about the Manhattan squatting scene, Food Not Bombs, Critical Mass, or hardcore punk. But this is Sid’s chance and she’s determined to make a home for herself—no matter what.