Joseph Mitchell’s trademark curiosity, respect and graveyard humour fuel these magical essays.
Mitchell is the laureate of old New York. The hidden corners of the city and the people who lived there are his subject. He captured the waterfront rooming-houses, nickel-a-drink saloons, all-night restaurants, the ‘visionaries, obsessives, imposters, fanatics, lost souls, the end-is-near street preachers, old Gypsy Kings and old Gypsy Queens, and out-and-out freak-show freaks.’
Written between 1943 and 1965, Up in the Old Hotel is the complete collection of Joseph Mitchell’s New Yorker journalism.
Oddballs of New York
When I went to live for a short time in New York in the mid-1990s, a friend gave me a copy of Up in the Old Hotel, a selection of the 1940s and ’50s New Yorker writings of Joseph Mitchell. I shall...
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