Book Launch | Nonstop Metropolis: A New York City Atlas
NYU’s Institute for Public Knowledge invites you to join us for the launch event for Nonstop Metropolis: A New York City Atlas, with editors Rebecca Solnit and Joshua Jelly-Schapiro. The editors will be in conversation with contributors Garnette Cadogan and Jonathan Tarleton. The program will include readings and Q&A with the audience, followed by a reception, during which books will be available for purchase and signing.
Nonstop Metropolis, the culminating volume in a trilogy of atlases, conveys innumerable unbound experiences of New York City through twenty-six imaginative maps and informative essays. Bringing together the insights of dozens of experts—from linguists to music historians, ethnographers, urbanists, and environmental journalists—amplified by cartographers, artists, and photographers, it explores all five boroughs of New York City and parts of nearby New Jersey. We are invited to travel through Manhattan’s playgrounds, from polyglot Queens to many-faceted Brooklyn, and from the resilient Bronx to the mystical kung fu hip-hop mecca of Staten Island. The contributors to this exquisitely designed and gorgeously illustrated volume celebrate New York City’s unique vitality, its incubation of the avant-garde, and its literary history, but they also critique its racial and economic inequality, environmental impact, and erasure of its past. Nonstop Metropolis allows us to excavate New York’s buried layers, to scrutinize its political heft, and to discover the unexpected in one of the most iconic cities in the world. It is both a challenge and homage to how New Yorkers think of their city, and how the world sees this capital of capitalism, culture, immigration, and more.
Contributors include: Sheerly Avni, Gaiutra Bahadur, Marshall Berman, Joe Boyd, Will Butler, Garnette Cadogan, Thomas J. Campanella, Daniel Aldana Cohen, Teju Cole, Joel Dinerstein, Paul La Farge, Francisco Goldman, Margo Jefferson, Lucy R. Lippard, Barry Lopez, Valeria Luiselli, Suketu Mehta, Emily Raboteau, Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts, Luc Sante, Heather Smith, Jonathan Tarleton, Astra Taylor, Alexandra T. Vazquez, and Christina Zanfagna. Features interviews with: Valerie Capers, Peter Coyote, Grandmaster Caz, Grandwizzard Theodore, Melle Mel, RZA.
Rebecca Solnit is a writer, historian, activist, and author of eighteen books about environment, landscape, community, art, politics, hope, and feminism, including two atlases, of San Francisco in 2010 and, New Orleans in 2013; Men Explain Things to Me; The Faraway Nearby; A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster; A Field Guide to Getting Lost; Wanderlust: A History of Walking; and River of Shadows, Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West (for which she received a Guggenheim, the National Book Critics Circle Award in criticism, and the Lannan Literary Award). A product of the California public education system from kindergarten to graduate school, she is a columnist at Harper’s and frequent contributor to the political site Tomdispatch.com.
Joshua Jelly-Schapiro is a geographer and writer whose work has appeared in publications including The New York Review of Books,The New Yorker, Harper’s, Artforum, and Transition, among many others. His upcoming book Island People: The Caribbean and the World, will be published by Knopf in November.
Garnette Cadogan is an essayist and journalist who focuses on history, culture, and the arts. He is editor-at-large for Non-Stop Metropolis: A New York City Atlas (edited by Rebecca Solnit and Joshua Jelly-Schapiro). His current research explores the promise and perils of urban life, the vitality and inequality of cities, and the challenges of pluralism. At the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture, where he is a fellow, Cadogan is writing a book on walking.
Jonathan Tarleton is a writer, oral historian and urbanist based in Brooklyn. He is chief researcher and a contributor for Nonstop Metropolis: A New York City Atlas and the former editor of the magazine Urban Omnibus.