BOOKPATHS

New York, New York

Christopher Reynolds shares some "New York City's spots for book lovers."

So, old-fashioned book people, hit literary Manhattan soon and hard. Even if you have only three days, as I did earlier this year, you can squeeze in an eight-stop tour, complete with thinking, drinking, Bibles, tote bags and a certain pair of municipal mascots.

New York City, New York

Teju Cole talks about his first novel, Open City.

Julius, the novel's main character, walks around New York for days observing his surroundings. The central conflict of the book, Cole explains, is what happens to a mind that takes things in — and one that's sensitive to what's going on around it.

Harlem, New York

Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts discusses her book, Harlem is Nowhere, on NPR.

'I think this is part of what made Harlem so fantastically unique,' Rhodes-Pitts says.  'The combination of people from so many different walks of life and so many different places who are all united by a certain current.'

Manhattan, New York, U.S.

Author Meghan Daum explains why we “must read” The Believers, by Zoe Heller.

The Litvinoffs aren't just a family, they're a symbol — of earnest leftiness, of NPR listenership writ large, of downtown Manhattan as locus of bohemian idealism. But even though this book is a satire, it's also tender about the ways these family members now find themselves profoundly unmoored. Their solution: to search for ballast in the form of belief systems; to fill the hole left by Joel's imminent death with an equally doctrinaire, if ultimately less loving, set of gospels. The result is a poignant, sometimes outrageous and very often hilarious novel about the courage — and also the cowardice — of standing by your convictions at all costs. I recommended it to more friends than I can count. – from “In Believers, Courage and Cowardice of Conviction,” by Meghan Daum, NPR Website

Emily Dickinson’s Garden, The New York Botanical Garden, Bronx, New York, U.S.

Lynn Neary visits Emily Dickinson’s Garden: the Poetry of Flowers exhibition at The New York Botanical Garden.

The poet Emily Dickinson lived a reclusive life at her family's home in Amherst, Mass., but while she rarely went out into society, she did spend a lot of time outdoors. Dickinson loved nature and was an avid gardener, and now an exhibition at the New York Botanical Garden called Emily Dickinson's Garden: The Poetry of Flowers is putting on display a side of the poet that is little known. --  from “A Flowering Tribute to Emily Dickinson,” by Lynn Neary, NPR Website

The New York Botanical Garden Website

David L. Ulin walks in “Holden Caulfield’s footsteps through Manhattan.”

David L. Ulin walks in “Holden Caulfield’s footsteps through Manhattan.”

You can walk Holden's Manhattan in one long afternoon, starting at Penn Station (or perhaps I should say the new Penn Station) and working your way north up Broadway through the theater district to the park. From there, you can check on the ducks in the lagoon, then wander over to the museums, before heading south, past the Central Park Zoo, and down through midtown to Grand Central Station. There are a few hidden landmarks, but for the most part, it's a city saunter, New York as New Yorkers know it, an insider's take on the streets. – from “Walking in Holden Caulfield’s Footsteps through Manhattan,” The Los Angeles Times

Harlem, New York, U.S.

Novelist Heidi W. Durrow explains why we “must read” Passing, by Nella Larsen.

I have read and re-read 'Passing' more than a dozen times. Each time I think I can hear Larsen's own voice more clearly: asking, demanding really, that each of us abandon the labels we've been assigned and celebrate the story that we are. – from “’Passing’ Across the Color Line in The Jazz Age,” by Heidi W. Durrow, NPR Website

Battery Park City, New York, U.S.

Ariel Kaminer visits a library “that most can only dream of.”

You, over there, mouthing off about the death of print. Keep it down; this is a library. Not just any library: This is Battery Park City’s public library branch, the city’s newest, greenest one yet, and it’s quite a sight to behold. – from “A Library That Most Can Only Dream Of,” by Ariel Kaminer, The New York Times

Millersport and Lockport, New York, U.S.

Joyce Carol Oates “returns to the town of her birth to revisit the places that haunt her memory and her extraordinary fiction.”

The contemporary French provincial house in which we live on three acres fronting a small lake is ‘home’ in the most immediate sense—this is the address to which our mail is delivered, and each of us hopes that this will be the last house of our lives; but if ‘home’ is the repository of our deepest, most abiding and most poignant dreams, the landscape that haunts us recurringly, then ‘home’ for me would be upstate New York—the rural crossroads of Millersport, on the Tonawanda Creek, and the city of Lockport on the Erie Canal. – from “Joyce Carol Oates Goes Home Again,” Smithsonian

Algonquin Round Table Walking Tours, New York, New York, U.S.

Kevin C. Fitzpatrick, author of A Journey into Dorothy Parker’s New York and co-editor of The Lost Algonquin Round Table, leads Algonquin Round Table Walking Tours.  The tours begin and end at the Algonquin Hotel, before moving on to  “more than 40 destinations.”  Visit the Algonquin Round Table Walking Tours webpage for this year's schedule and information.

The lively 2-hour walk celebrates Dorothy Parker, Robert Benchley, George S Kaufman, Harpo Marx, Edna Ferber, Franklin P. Adams, Heywood Broun, Harold Ross, Robert Sherwood, Marc Connelly and the rest of the Vicious Circle. – from Algonquin Round Table Walking Tours Webpage