Here are 100 books that Hollow City fans have personally recommended if you like
Hollow City.
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I’ve been fascinated by cities ever since I was a teenager without a driver’s license on Long Island and my parents let me take the train into Manhattan (“Just be back by midnight!”). In college, I studied architecture and urbanism and learned how cities churned and changed. Today, having written about places like New Orleans, San Francisco, Mumbai and Berlin for publications including Harper’s and The New York Times Magazine, as well as in my books, I know I’ll be walking, riding, and eating my way through cities forever. And reading through them, too!
I remember the first time I realized I was in a city without addresses—Dubai, as it happened—and I was dumbfounded that such a place could exist, let alone succeed. In this book, Deirdre Mask unearths the hidden history of street addresses—a relatively recent invention from the Age of Enlightenment—and notes how many places ranging from rural West Virginia to hyper-modern Tokyo and Seoul do just fine without them.
In this wild ride from addressless ancient Rome to meticulously gridded and numbered Chicago, Mask explains how addresses have been used to keep track of citizens (for both good and ill) and how street names allow urban communities to define themselves by, say, changing Robert E. Lee Avenue into Martin Luther King Boulevard.
'Deirdre Mask's book was just up my Strasse, alley, avenue and boulevard.' -Simon Garfield, author of Just My Type
'Fascinating ... intelligent but thoroughly accessible ... full of surprises' - Sunday Times
Starting with a simple question, 'what do street addresses do?', Deirdre Mask travels the world and back in time to work out how we describe where we live and what that says about us.
From the chronological numbers of Tokyo to the naming of Bobby Sands Street in Iran, she explores how our address - or lack of one - expresses…
It is April 1st, 2038. Day 60 of China's blockade of the rebel island of Taiwan.
The US government has agreed to provide Taiwan with a weapons system so advanced that it can disrupt the balance of power in the region. But what pilot would be crazy enough to run…
I’ve been fascinated by cities ever since I was a teenager without a driver’s license on Long Island and my parents let me take the train into Manhattan (“Just be back by midnight!”). In college, I studied architecture and urbanism and learned how cities churned and changed. Today, having written about places like New Orleans, San Francisco, Mumbai and Berlin for publications including Harper’s and The New York Times Magazine, as well as in my books, I know I’ll be walking, riding, and eating my way through cities forever. And reading through them, too!
This book takes something so in-your-face yet so often ignored about New York and other 21st-century global metropolises—their polyglot nature—and makes it the focus. I know when I arrive in a major city, the cacophony of myriad languages stands out on that first subway, bus, and tram ride. But soon enough, it all becomes background noise.
By foregrounding this phenomenon, arguing that it’s peaking today as global migration swells, and telling the stories of several tenacious language communities in New York’s outer boroughs, Perlin reads NYC through the alphabets that cover its bodega awnings.
Half of all 7,000-plus human languages may disappear over the next century and - because many have never been recorded - when they're gone, it will be forever. Ross Perlin, a linguist and co-director of the Endangered Language Alliance, is racing against time to map little-known languages across the most linguistically diverse city in history: contemporary New York.
In Language City, Perlin recounts the unique history of immigration that shaped the city, and follows six remarkable yet ordinary speakers of endangered languages deep into their communities to learn how they are maintaining and reviving their languages against overwhelming odds. Perlin…
I’ve been fascinated by cities ever since I was a teenager without a driver’s license on Long Island and my parents let me take the train into Manhattan (“Just be back by midnight!”). In college, I studied architecture and urbanism and learned how cities churned and changed. Today, having written about places like New Orleans, San Francisco, Mumbai and Berlin for publications including Harper’s and The New York Times Magazine, as well as in my books, I know I’ll be walking, riding, and eating my way through cities forever. And reading through them, too!
This book looks at flâneurie, the Gilded Age gentlemen’s pastime of walking through a city purely for curiosity’s sake, through women’s eyes. Of course, a man has opportunities to walk through a city unnoticed and unimpeded in a way that a woman does not.
Walking with Elkin through cities I know well helped me realize how much I take for granted as a man (significant helpings of anonymity and safety) and the particular joys of liberation cities have offered women past, present, and future.
FINALIST FOR THE PEN/DIAMONSTEIN-SPIELVOGEL AWARD FOR THE ART OF THE ESSAY
A New York Times Notable Book of 2017
The flâneur is the quintessentially masculine figure of privilege and leisure who strides the capitals of the world with abandon. But it is the flâneuse who captures the imagination of the cultural critic Lauren Elkin. In her wonderfully gender-bending new book, the flâneuse is a “determined, resourceful individual keenly attuned to the creative potential of the city and the liberating possibilities of a good walk.” Virginia Woolf called it “street haunting”; Holly Golightly epitomized it in Breakfast at Tiffany’s; and Patti…
A Duke with rigid opinions, a Lady whose beliefs conflict with his, a long disputed parcel of land, a conniving neighbour, a desperate collaboration, a failure of trust, a love found despite it all.
Alexander Cavendish, Duke of Ravensworth, returned from war to find that his father and brother had…
I’ve been fascinated by cities ever since I was a teenager without a driver’s license on Long Island and my parents let me take the train into Manhattan (“Just be back by midnight!”). In college, I studied architecture and urbanism and learned how cities churned and changed. Today, having written about places like New Orleans, San Francisco, Mumbai and Berlin for publications including Harper’s and The New York Times Magazine, as well as in my books, I know I’ll be walking, riding, and eating my way through cities forever. And reading through them, too!
I’ve read more books than I care to remember that treat cities solely as markets, using an economic lens that reduces urbanites to mere maximizers of their own economic self-interest. This book does the opposite, and that’s why I found it so refreshing.
Urban observer and activist Jeremiah Moss chronicles New York City during the pandemic, a time when there’s literally nothing to buy—no stores to shop in, no restaurants to eat in, and no fashion trends to keep up with. With the market shut down, Moss finds that neighbors reconnect with neighbors on a human level, and a creative, festival-like atmosphere sweeps the city. This book helped me remember what’s great about living in a big city despite the many obvious cost-of-living drawbacks.
Author, social critic and "New York City's career elegist" (The New York Times), Jeremiah Moss felt alienated in a town that had become suburbanised and sanitised. Then lockdown launched an unprecedented urban experiment: What happens when an entire social class abandons the city? In the streets made vibrant by New Yorkers left behind, Moss found a sense of freedom he never thought possible. Participating in a historic explosion of protest, resistance and spontaneity. From queer BLM marches to exuberant outdoor dance parties, he discovers that, without "hyper-normal" people to constrain it, New York can be more creative, connected, humane and…
As a writer, artist, and actor throughout my life, I’ve explored and enjoyed many artistic forms. While I appreciate books across many genres, I elevate to the highest level those works that manage to break conventional boundaries and create something original. In my own work, I have always challenged myself to create something unique with a medium that has never been done before. At the same time, I have sought to discover a process and resulting work that inspires readers’ own creativity and challenges them to expand their imagination.
I Hate the Internet is an uncompromising punch in the face that blends comedy with a didactic, experimental style. It names names and kicks ass. It’s vibrant and energizing. The majority of traditional literary fiction at its core finds its value in teaching empathy through believable characters. And while there’s nothing wrong with that, we still stand today with a world collapsing around us environmentally and politically. We need more books that just say fuck it, conservative forms have not saved us from global warming, political fascism, or dehumanizing capitalism so let’s try something different. At least here’s a unique attempt to rage against the machine. I call it a must-read.
In New York in the middle of the twentieth century, comic book companies figured out how to make millions from comics without paying their creators anything. In San Francisco at the start of the twenty-first century, tech companies figured out how to make millions from online abuse without paying its creators anything.
In the 1990s, Adeline drew a successful comic book series that ended up making her kind-of famous. In 2013, Adeline aired some unfashionable opinions that made their way onto the Internet. The reaction of the Internet, being a tool for making millions in advertising revenue from online abuse,…
Years ago in a psycholinguistics class, I discovered that a person’s primary language—not just their vocabulary but the structure of the language itself—shapes the way that person perceives the world and relationships around them. Ever since, I’ve been fascinated with perspective and how perceptions of an event are shaped by who is experiencing them, what stage of life they’re in, the language they speak, and so on. As a full-time marketer in addition to an author, I have to consider every angle of a project before I can begin, whether I’m designing an ad or writing dialogue between characters.
The Alvarados are an unhealthy family with a very big communication problem. The patriarch turns into a shell of himself obsessed only with rainfall, the matriarch is hiding her own secrets, and their adult children are all in varying stages of trouble in their own relationships.
I loved that this book was set in 2016, in California, centered around a Mexican-American family, and did not explicitly address immigration issues or Donald Trump—even if that was very much hinted at towards the end of the novel.
Aside from the family’s journey to healthier relationships with themselves and each other, it was refreshing to see another perspective of that moment in time. It was a good reminder to me that we all contain multitudes, and that no single story is the whole story.
FORECAST: Storm clouds are on the horizon in L.A. Weather, a fun, fast-paced novel of a Mexican-American family from the author of the #1 Los Angeles Times bestseller Esperanza's Box of Saints
L.A. is parched, dry as a bone, and all Oscar, the weather-obsessed patriarch of the Alvarado family, desperately wants is a little rain. He's harboring a costly secret that distracts him from everything else. His wife, Keila, desperate for a life with a little more intimacy and a little less Weather Channel, feels she has no choice but to end their marriage. Their three daughters-Claudia, a television chef…
The Duke's Christmas Redemption
by
Arietta Richmond,
A Duke who has rejected love, a Lady who dreams of a love match, an arranged marriage, a house full of secrets, a most unneighborly neighbor, a plot to destroy reputations, an unexpected love that redeems it all.
Lady Charlotte Wyndham, given in an arranged marriage to a man she…
I am a White person who grew up in a primarily Black DC neighborhood in the 1980s. Growing up in a Black community in DC at a time when the city was experiencing a cascade of crises – from the spread of crack to an AIDS epidemic to a failing school system – has fundamentally shaped my life and my view of the world. When I returned in the early twenty-first century to my city to find it had significantly changed and that many of my Black neighbors had been pushed out, I was compelled to learn more about DC before gentrification and to understand the path the city I love had taken.
This is a great book if you want to understand how some expressions of blackness can be valued while Black people are being displaced.
Derek Hyra describes gentrification and racial change in the Shaw neighborhood of Washington, DC – which went from 90 percent Black in 1970 to 30 percent Black by 2010. Shaw’s status as the cultural epicenter of the Black community in the early twentieth century has become a selling point: many of the new establishments highlight this Black history, with odes to Marvin Gaye, Langston Hughes, and Duke Ellington in their names and featured artwork.
Hyra argues many of the White newcomers to Shaw embrace its Black history while ignoring the needs and preferences of contemporary Black residents. Thus, Black residents are experiencing both political and cultural displacement as they have lost political and economic power in the neighborhood.
For long-time residents of Washington, D.C.'s Shaw/U Street, the neighborhood has become almost unrecognizable in recent years. Where the city's most infamous open-air drug market once stood, a farmers' market now sells grass-fed beef and homemade duck egg ravioli. On the corner where AM.PM carryout used to dish out soul food, a new establishment markets its $28 foie gras burger. Shaw is experiencing a dramatic transformation, from "ghetto" to "gilded ghetto," where white newcomers are rehabbing homes, developing dog parks, and paving the way for a third wave coffee shop on nearly every block.Race, Class, and Politics in the Cappuccino…
I am a White person who grew up in a primarily Black DC neighborhood in the 1980s. Growing up in a Black community in DC at a time when the city was experiencing a cascade of crises – from the spread of crack to an AIDS epidemic to a failing school system – has fundamentally shaped my life and my view of the world. When I returned in the early twenty-first century to my city to find it had significantly changed and that many of my Black neighbors had been pushed out, I was compelled to learn more about DC before gentrification and to understand the path the city I love had taken.
Read this book if you want to understand the nuances of blackness in the nation’s capital.
Brandi Thompson Summers argues in her book, Black in Place, that gentrification along the H Street Corridor in DC has involved the embracing of blackness as an aesthetic alongside the displacement of actual Black people. Summers explains how blackness came to be valued as a prized aesthetic at the same time that Black people experienced the heavy policing, predatory lending, and displacement that both make possible and accompany the gentrification of Black neighborhoods.
While Washington, D.C., is still often referred to as "Chocolate City," it has undergone significant demographic, political, and economic change in the last decade. In D.C., no place represents this shift better than the H Street corridor. In this book, Brandi Thompson Summers documents D.C.'s shift to a "post-chocolate" cosmopolitan metropolis by charting H Street's economic and racial developments. In doing so, she offers a theoretical framework for understanding how blackness is aestheticized and deployed to organize landscapes and raise capital. Summers focuses on the continuing significance of blackness in a place like the nation's capital, how blackness contributes to…
Since the age of seven, I've been conscious of the need to bypass how one is supposed to do things. I realized then that my grandmother could not pursue a writing career because she was also a woman and a wife; a cautionary tale I took to heart since I was already beginning to identify as an artist. I'm driven to uncover how we recognize what we see, and how forces beyond our control engender or foreclose upon new ways of being in the world. A professional life lived in the arts has allowed the fullest flexibility for exploring these ideas as one is generally encouraged to think differently.
This is the book that launched a thousand essays about gentrification in urban neighborhoods and reinvented the term “revanchism” for use in critical geography.
From the French noun revanche, revanchism refers to a policy or movement focused on reacquiring a nation's lost territory. The Revanchist City as it became known after Smith’s book, describes city residents under siege by their own city governments.
Starting with a description of the battles over who could use Tompkins Square Park in New York City’s Lower East Side in the 1980s and 90s, and moving on to other case studies (some global), Smith shows how cities are transformed into zones of international capital investment and class privilege through neoliberal policies enacted at the municipal level.
Why have so many central and inner cities in Europe, North America and Australia been so radically revamped in the last three decades, converting urban decay into new chic? Will the process continue in the twenty-first century or has it ended? What does this mean for the people who live there? Can they do anything about it? This book challenges conventional wisdom, which holds gentrification to be the simple outcome of new middle-class tastes and a demand for urban living. It reveals gentrification as part of a much larger shift in the political economy and culture of the late twentieth…
This book follows the journey of a writer in search of wisdom as he narrates encounters with 12 distinguished American men over 80, including Paul Volcker, the former head of the Federal Reserve, and Denton Cooley, the world’s most famous heart surgeon.
In these and other intimate conversations, the book…
I am a White person who grew up in a primarily Black DC neighborhood in the 1980s. Growing up in a Black community in DC at a time when the city was experiencing a cascade of crises – from the spread of crack to an AIDS epidemic to a failing school system – has fundamentally shaped my life and my view of the world. When I returned in the early twenty-first century to my city to find it had significantly changed and that many of my Black neighbors had been pushed out, I was compelled to learn more about DC before gentrification and to understand the path the city I love had taken.
This book offers insight into how Black DC residents think about their changing city.
For many Black long-term residents, DC has long been a “Chocolate city,” a city where Black people held both the demographic and political majority, and where Black people created their own spaces of belonging, pride, and self-reliance.
This book draws from oral histories and ethnographic data with long-term African-American residents of DC to explain both how gentrification has enhanced the vulnerability of low-income residents and how Black residents of DC are reclaiming spaces in their city.
This book uses qualitative data to explore the experiences and ideas of African Americans confronting and constructing gentrification in Washington, D.C. It contextualizes Black Washingtonians' perspectives on belonging and attachment during a marked period of urban restructuring and demographic change in the Nation's Capital and sheds light on the process of social hierarchies and standpoints unfolding over time. African Americans and Gentrification in Washington, D.C. emerges as a portrait of a heterogeneous African American population wherein members define their identity and culture as a people informed by the impact of injustice on the urban landscape. It presents oral history and…
