New York

Books

Looking back: Wharton, Fitzgerald, and Ourselves

By Caitlin O’Hara Think of favorite endings of books that really resonate: Levin and his revelation towards goodness at the end of Anna Karenina. Molly Bloom’s return to girlish passion for her…

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8 min
6.2K

Articles

A Tender Evening in JR Moehringer’s “The Tender Bar”

By Jennifer Locke The local bar: it’s a place both mythologized and longed-for, a place Americans with packed schedules and commuter lifestyles dream of in the same way that they…

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4 min
3K

Travel

“Put the Map Away” and Other Travel Tips from Samantha Brown

By Amanda Festa Literary Traveler recently attended the first Women’s Travel Fest in New York — one day, countless inspiring and passionate women from all over the world. The Festival featured…

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3 min
3.3K

Books

Gatsby: Under the Red, White, and Blue

By Jessica Monk Did you know that F. Scott Fitzgerald was distantly related to the man who composed “The Star-Spangled Banner?” That, in fact, he was named after him? I…

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7 min
7K

Articles

Betty Smith Knew Brooklyn

By Amy Hamblen Growing up in the Midwest, my childhood was a whirl of swimming in strip pits, hunting for morel mushrooms in small forests, rolling down grassy hills, and…

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10 min
6.7K

Articles

Homesick and Happy in Colm Tóibín’s Brooklyn

By Sue Norton Colm Tóibín’s novel Brooklyn operates, like so much of modern fiction, on planes of moral ambiguity and relativism. Few clearly correct options present themselves to the central…

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James Fenimore Cooper Statue, Cooper Park

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9 min
4.4K

Articles

James Fenimore Cooper: Cooperstown’s Literary Ghost

by Victor A. Walsh By mid-morning on this dreary gray Sunday, crowds of people dressed in shorts and sporting baseball caps, are bustling in and out of the many baseball…

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10 min
4.4K

Articles

Literary Brooklyn Heights

by Norm Goldstein “I live in Brooklyn,” Truman Capote once wrote. “By choice.” He described the New York City borough, for the most part, as a “veritable veldt of tawdriness.” …

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7 min
2K

Articles

One’s Self and the Other: NYC and The History of Love

I was standing alone in the Buhre Avenue station, waiting for the number six train to arrive and bring me downtown, where I would attend a going-away party for friends who would not be coming back, mourning a loss that had not yet occurred.

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7 min
3.8K

Articles

The Irrational Allure of Writers’ Houses*

*Adapted for Literary Traveler from the Introduction to A Skeptic’s Guide To Writers’ Houses By Anne Trubek Around the time the housing collapse hit New York City, a modest one…

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