From its first shock waves in 2008, the Great Recession has been reshaping American cities. Detroit collapsed, and the ongoing national rollback in industry has meant the death of factory towns like Greensboro, North Carolina and Reading, Pennsylvania. But the effects of the crash have been far from uniform. The populations of gentrifying cities such as San Francisco and Brooklyn continue to expand, with rents soaring and neighborhood demographics changing overnight. Providence, Rhode Island is experiencing a civic renaissance that disguises lingering corruption in its political system. The two hundred citizens of Whittier, Alaska, have been approached about starring in a reality TV show. And racial profiling by police in cities like Cincinnati, Palm Coast, and Baltimore has set the stage for protests that have swept the nation. City by City, edited by Keith Gessen and Stephen Squibb, is a collection of essays from a new generation of writers working to document the places they call home. With the specificity of Studs Terkel and the humor of Hunter S. Thompson, they capture the forces-gentrification, underemployment, politics, culture, and crime-that are changing the lives of their neighborhoods, their neighbors, and themselves.

City by City: Dispatches from the American Metropolis

Politics & Social Sciences

Social Sciences

Cultural Writing. Literary Criticism. The two discussions in WHAT WE SHOULD HAVE KNOWN took place at the offices of n+1 in the summer of 2007. Eleven n+1 editors and contributors--including Caleb Crain, Meghan Falvey, Mark Greif, and Ilya Bernstein--met to talk frankly about regrets they have (or don't have) about college--what they wish they had read or had not read, listened to or not listened to, thought or not thought, been or not been. The idea for the discussions was prompted by a desire to give college students a directed guide, of some sort, to the world of literature, philosophy, and thought that they might not otherwise receive from the current highly specialized university environment. They were also an attempt to answer the "canon"-based approach to college study in two ways: by identifying canonical books produced by our contemporaries or near-contemporaries--something conservative writers have always refused to do--and, second, by articulating a better reason to read the best books ever written than that they authorize and underwrite a system of brutal economic competition and inequality.

What We Should Have Known: Two Discussions (Research Branch Pamphlet Series #2) (N+1 Research Branch Pamphlet)

Literature & Fiction

Keith Gessen

Literary

See the best price to sell, buy or rent books by the n+1 publisher. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by n+1

See the best price to sell, buy or rent books by the n+1 publisher. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

City by City: Dispatches from the American Metropolis

What We Should Have Known: Two Discussions (Research Branch Pamphlet Series #2) (N+1 Research Branch Pamphlet)