A sharp, witty portrait of New York that reveals how the city actually works.

What if bestselling author Catherine Lacey was the friend showing you around New York?

New York City is sprawling, filthy, noisy, expensive, utterly indifferent, and universally romanticized. It has convinced generation after generation of dreamers to hitch their fantasies to its possibility and grandeur—the consummate American success story.

But what’s it like to actually live there?

In this playful, perceptive guide to the place’s mythology and mundanities alike, celebrated novelist Catherine Lacey brings her signature clarity to a place that thrives on attention but resists easy understanding. Her New York moves through neighborhoods and among landmarks, exploring the city and its peculiar social grammar: how complaining breeds intimacy, how eccentricity ages into charm, and why leaving is rarely as simple as it seems.

Sharp and intimate, Lacey’s New York is attuned to the many ways the city is lived, imagined, and performed: a clear-eyed valentine to a place continually made and remade by the people who move through it every day.