Making the City: Selected stories from Capital New York

Description

A Palestinian food-cart vendor with a secret recipe and a Chinese family struggling to earn its living with a takeout restaurant in the South Bronx; an ambitious young politician with a knack for working the press and a police chief who's better at politics than his boss; a character actor trying to break into opera and a Queens rapper navigating the shoals of high art, pop stardom, and industrialized sexism; a famous woman who would challenge the supremacy of The New York Times and a self-deprecating man who would be its shining knight; the street hustles of the perennially homeless and the street photography of a fashion icon. These are some of the characters we've covered at Capital New York over the last three years, since we began publishing from a cluster of white melamine Ikea desks in a windowless room in Soho in June 2010. The story subjects are a diverse group, but they have in common a desire to fix their fates against the roiling reality of life here. They're...