Up in the Old Hotel
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4.3 • 3 Ratings
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- £6.99
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- £6.99
Publisher Description
'The master of a journalistic style long vanished - urbane, lucid, courteous... A masterpiece of observation and storytelling' Ian McEwan
Mitchell is the laureate of old New York. The hidden corners of the city and the people who lived there are his subject. He captured the waterfront rooming-houses , nickel-a-drink saloons, all-night restaurants, the 'visionaries, obsessives, imposters, fanatics, lost souls, the end-is-near street preachers, old Gypsy Kings and old Gypsy Queens, and out-and-out freak-show freaks.' Mitchell's trademark curiosity, respect and graveyard humour fuel these magical essays.
Written between 1943 and 1965, Up in the Old Hotel is the complete collection of Joseph Mitchell 's New Yorker journalism and includes McSorley's Wonderful Saloon, Old Mr Flood, The Bottom of the Harbour and Joe Gould's Secret.
'Joseph Mitchell is buried treasure' Salman Rushdie
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Like a Coney Island sideshow barker who might have appeared in one of Mitchell's New Yorker profiles, this collection promises an uncommon world. And it delivers, in compassionate, wistful examinations of early-20th-century New Yorkers who share a common trait: they exist on the outskirts of society in either habit or mind. There is nine-year-old Philippa Duke Schuyler, who has an IQ of 185 and ``reads Plutarch on train trips, eats steaks raw, writes poems in honor of her dolls, plays poker, and is the composer of more than sixty pieces for the piano.'' Also compelling are profiles of New York places, as much characters as people are. Mitchell's writing on McSorley's Saloon, the Union League of the Deaf, Sloppy Louie's--all either gone or changed--captures the town in its days as a manufacturing center. If the four sections in this collection ( McSorley's Wonderful Saloon, Old Mr. Flood, The Bottom of the Harbor, Joe Gould's Secret ) evoked only a long-lost New York, they would still be worthwhile. But there is more. Mitchell speaks of facts that enlighten and redeem--the book's greatest gift.
