Almost ready!

In order to save audiobooks to your Wish List you must be signed in to your account.

New Yorkers

A City and It's People in Our Time

Length 14 hours 6 minutes

Language English

Narrators Catherine Ho, Maria Liatis, Richard Poe, Ron Butler, Karen Chilton, Luis Moreno, Andrea Gallo, Samara Naeymi, Michael Braun & Nick Mills

This audiobook uses AI narration.

We’re taking steps to make sure AI narration is transparent.

Learn more

Send as gift Add to Wish List

Almost ready!

In order to save audiobooks to your Wish List you must be signed in to your account.

Bookseller recommendation

“No book could capture the endless chaos, ambition, and struggles for survival of our biggest city, but you can get a hint of its millions of voices here. Working in the Studs Terkel oral-history tradition, Taylor, a Canadian who gave the same loving treatment to another adopted city in Londoners, has chosen the best from his years of conversations with ordinary New Yorkers, and the best of these—from a skyscraper window washer, a 911 dispatcher, an elevator repairman, and a lawyer almost killed by COVID—express, with everyday profundity, philosophies of living in a great and merciless metropolis. (For the audiobook, available through our partners at Libro.fm and read by a rotating cast of ten narrators, a special shoutout to Luis Moreno, who pulled off the tricky assignment of reading other people's oral histories with a particular New York flair.)”
— Tom • Phinney Books

Summary

A symphony of contemporary New York through the magnificent words of its people—from the best-selling author of Londoners.

In the first twenty years of the twenty-first century, New York City has been convulsed by terrorist attack, blackout, hurricane, recession, social injustice, and pandemic. New Yorkers weaves the voices
of some of the city’s best talkers into an indelible portrait of New York in our time—and a powerful hymn to the vitality and resilience of its people.

Best-selling author Craig Taylor has been hailed as “a peerless journalist and a beautiful craftsman” (David Rakoff), acclaimed for the way he “fuses the mundane truth of conversation with the higher
truth of art” (Michel Faber). In the wake of his celebrated book Londoners, Taylor moved to New York and spent years meeting regularly with hundreds of New Yorkers as diverse as the city itself. New
Yorkers features 75 of the most remarkable of them, their fascinating true tales arranged in thematic sections that follow Taylor’s growing engagement with the city.

Here are the uncelebrated people who propel New York each day—bodega cashier, hospital nurse, elevator repairman, emergency dispatcher. Here are those who wire the lights at the top of the Empire
State Building, clean the windows of Rockefeller Center, and keep the subway running. Here are people whose experiences reflect the city’s fractured realities: the mother of a Latino teenager jailed
at Rikers, a BLM activist in the wake of police shootings. And here are those who capture the ineffable feeling of New York, such as a balloon handler in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade or a security guard at the Statue of Liberty.

Vibrant and bursting with life, New Yorkers explores the nonstop hustle to make it; the pressures on new immigrants, people of color, and the poor; the constant battle between loving the city and
wanting to leave it; and the question of who gets to be considered a "New Yorker." It captures the strength of an irrepressible city that—no matter what it goes through—dares call itself the greatest in the world.

History Nonfiction