Leisure Reading: Queens, NY

New York Times 100 Notable Books of 2014 * Washington Post Top 50 Fiction List for 2014 * Entertainment Weekly Ten Best Fiction Books of 2014 * Esquire 5 Most Important Books of 2014 * Publishers Weekly Best Books of 2014 * One of Janet Maslin's Ten Favorite Books of the Year in The New York Times The instant New York Times bestseller The Washington Post calls a "stunning...superbly rendered" novel, and Entertainment Weekly describes as "a gripping family saga, maybe the best...since The Corrections." Born in 1941, Eileen Tumulty is raised by her Irish immigrant parents in Woodside, Queens, in an apartment where the mood swings between heartbreak and hilarity, depending on how much alcohol has been consumed. From an early age, Eileen wished that she lived somewhere else. She sets her sights on upper class Bronxville, New York, and an American Dream is born. Driven by this longing, Eileen places her stock and love in Ed Leary, a handsome young scientist, and with him begins a family. Over the years Eileen encourages her husband to want more: a better job, better friends, a better house. It slowly becomes clear that his growing reluctance is part of a deeper, more incomprehensive psychological shift. An inescapable darkness enters their lives, and Eileen and Ed and their son Connell try desperately to hold together a semblance of the reality they have known, and to preserve, against long odds, an idea they have cherished of the future. Described by The New York Times Book Review as "A long, gorgeous epic, full of love and caring...one of the best novels you'll read this year," We Are Not Ourselves is a testament to our greatest desires and our greatest frailties. Through the lives of these characters, Thomas charts the story of the American Century. The result is, "stunning...The joys of this book are the joys of any classic work of literature-for that is what this is destined to become-superbly rendered small moments that capture both an individual life and the universality of that person's experience" (The Washington Post).

What happens when persons of several Latin American national groups reside in the same neighborhood-- Milagros Ricourt and Ruby Danta consider the stories of women of different nationalities--Colombian, Cuban, Dominican, Ecuadorian, Peruvian, Puerto Rican, Uruguayan, and others--who live together in Corona, a working-class neighborhood in Queens. Corona has long been an arrival point for immigrants and is now made up predominantly of Spanish-speaking immigrants from the Caribbean and South and Central America, with smaller numbers from Asia, Africa, and Europe. There are also long-established populations of white Americans, mainly of Italian origin, and African Americans.The authors find that the new pan-Latin American community in Corona has emerged from the interactions of everyday living. Hispanas de Queens focuses on the places where women gather in Corona--bodegas, hospitals, schoolyards, and Roman Catholic and Protestant churches--to show how informal alliances arise from proximity.Ricourt and Danta document how a group of leaders, mainly women, consciously promoted this strong sense of community to build panethnic organizations and a Latino political voice. Hispanas de Queens shows how a new group identity--Hispanic or Latino--is formed without replacing an individual's identification as an immigrant from a particular country. Instead, an additional identity is created and can be mobilized by pan-Latino leaders and organizations.

A world away from the bustle of Manhattan, College Point, Queens, boasts one of the most interesting histories of any New York City neighborhood. College Point began as a sleepy rural hamlet, but by the mid-nineteenth century, immigration and the industrial revolution had transformed it into a booming suburb. By 1900, the community had a distinct identity as home to several thousand residents and host to hordes of weekend visitors drawn by its spectacular East River setting and beer garden resorts. College Point recounts this neighborhood's colorful story through photographs and other illustrations from the magnificent collection of the Poppenhusen Institute, the community center founded in 1868 by a local industrialist and benefactor. The institute maintains an important place in College Point life, offering a wide range of classes, concerts, and other activities to this quirky but quintessential New York neighborhood.

The borough of Queens, New York, has seen many historical and geographical changes. Marshlands, woods, and farms gave way to factories, thriving communities, and the nation's premier arterial highway system. Queens offers a rare look at New York City's largest borough, featuring many never-before-seen images.

In 1824, a wealthy shipping merchant by the name of Abraham Bell purchased 245 acres in the area now known as Bayside. He created an upper and lower farm, bisected them with a country lane now called Bell Boulevard, and with this Bayside began to develop. Over the generations, Bayside evolved from its beginnings as a rural farming community to a resort destination with lavish estates that lined the shore of Little Neck Bay. Later the town was transformed again into a commuter suburb touted by real estate developers for its scenic beauty and convenient location. Bayside chronicles the community's ever-changing history through this collection of vintage photographs culled from the Bayside Historical Society's archives.

In the 1890s, electric lighting and improved roads were just the beginning of the changes about to take place in Flushing, New York. Once a rural village of wide-open farms and magnificent estates, Flushing transformed into a community of more than 200,000 people and quickly became one of the busiest neighborhoods in Queens. Flushing explores these dramatic changes with many never-before-seen images.

Written in a personal, moving, and humorous style, The Last Days of Shea chronicles the New York Mets from October 2006, when the team lost the National League Championship Series, to October 2008, when the team began to dismantle its antiquated, inadequate, and dearly loved Shea Stadium. The book is about following a baseball team with one's heart, mind, and soul. It represents the experience of being in a crowd at a ballpark, following a pennant race, enduring an offseason, experiencing streaks, slumps, triumph and heartbreak. All of this is represented against the imminent destruction of a stadium "that is not likely to be represented as well in the perfect and profitable little park that will replace it."

A Louis Armstrong timeline -- Introduction -- Red beans and rice : the early years, 1901-1921 -- Hear me talkin' to ya : 1920s -- Hobo, you can't ride that train : 1930s -- Swing that music : 1940s -- High society : 1950s -- What a wonderful world : 1960s and beyond -- I hope Gabriel likes my music -- A Louis Armstrong glossary.
"The quintessential American artist Louis Armstrong was born in 1901 in New Orleans and died in 1971 in New York City, where he had lived for many years in a modest house in Queens. The house is now a museum in his honour. This work tells the story of Armstrong's life through his writings, scrapbooks and artworks"--Publisher's description.

James and Karla Murray have been capturing impeccably accurate photographs of New York City since the 1990s. In the course of their travels throughout the city's boroughs they've also taken great care to document the stories behind the scenery. The Murrays have rendered the out of the way bodegas, candy shops and record stores just as faithfully as the historically important institutions and well known restaurants, bars and cafes. This 336 page volume collects the best of their work in one place.

This groundbreaking Norton Anthology includes the work ofnbsp;201 Latino writers from Chicano, Cuban-, Puerto Rican-, and Dominican-American traditions, as well as writing from other Spanish-speaking countries. Under the general editorship of award-winning cultural critic Ilan Stavans, The Norton Anthology of Latino Literature traces four centuries of writing, from letters to the Spanish crown by sixteenth-century conquistadors to the cutting-edge expressions of twenty-first-century cartoonistas and artists of reggaeton. In six chronological sections--Colonization, Annexation, Acculturation, Upheaval, Into the Mainstream, and Popular Traditions--it encompasses all genres, featuring such writers as José Martí, William Carlos Williams, Julia Alvarez, Oscar Hijuelos, Cristina García, Piri Thomas, Esmeralda Santiago, and Junot Díaz. Twelve years in the making, The Norton Anthology of Latino Literature sheds new light on "nuestra America" through a gathering of writing unprecedented in scope and vitality.

On the heels of Brooklyn, Manhattan and the Bronx, the borough of Queens enters the chamber of Noir. Queens county is the largest NY City borough, accomodating two beaches, two airports, Aqueduct Racetrack, three elevated train structures and Shea Stadium. Queens Noir has set 20 original crime stories in the neighbourhoods. Brand new stories by: Denis Hamill, Maggie Estep, Megan Abbott, Robert Knightly, Liz Martinez, Jill Eisenstadt, Mary Byrne, Tori Carrington, Shailly P. Agnihotri and more.

A dazzling novel from one of our finest writers--an epic yet intimate family saga about three generations of all-American radicals At the center of Jonathan Lethem's superb new novel stand two extraordinary women: Rose Zimmer, the aptly nicknamed Red Queen of Sunnyside, Queens, is an unreconstructed Communist who savages neighbors, family, and political comrades with the ferocity of her personality and the absolutism of her beliefs. Her precocious and willful daughter, Miriam, equally passionate in her activism, flees Rose's influence to embrace the dawning counterculture of Greenwich Village.      These women cast spells over the men in their lives: Rose's aristocratic German Jewish husband, Albert; her cousin, the feckless chess hustler Lenny Angrush; Cicero Lookins, the brilliant son of her black cop lover; Miriam's (slightly fraudulent) Irish folksinging husband, Tommy Gogan; their bewildered son, Sergius. Flawed and idealistic, Lethem's characters struggle to inhabit the utopian dream in an America where radicalism is viewed with bemusement, hostility, or indifference.      As the decades pass--from the parlor communism of the '30s, McCarthyism, the civil rights movement, ragged '70s communes, the romanticization of the Sandinistas, up to the Occupy movement of the moment--we come to understand through Lethem's extraordinarily vivid storytelling that the personal may be political, but the political, even more so, is personal.      Lethem's characters may pursue their fates within History with a capital H, but his novel is--at its mesmerizing, beating heart--about love.

Motivated by potentially turning Flushing Meadows, literally a land of refuse, into his greatest public park, Robert Moses--New York's "Master Builder"--brought the World's Fair to the Big Apple for 1964 and '65. Though considered a financial failure, the 1964-65 World' s Fair was a Sixties flashpoint in areas from politics to pop culture, technology to urban planning, and civil rights to violent crime.In an epic narrative, the New York Times bestseller Tomorrow-Land shows the astonishing pivots taken by New York City, America, and the world during the Fair. It fetched Disney's empire from California and Michelangelo's La Pieta from Europe; and displayed flickers of innovation from Ford, GM, and NASA--from undersea and outerspace colonies to personal computers. It housed the controversial work of Warhol (until Governor Rockefeller had it removed); and lured Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters. Meanwhile, the Fair--and its house band, Guy Lombardo and his Royal Canadians--sat in the musical shadows of the Beatles and Bob Dylan, who changed rock-and-roll right there in Queens. And as Southern civil rights efforts turned deadly, and violent protests also occurred in and around the Fair, Harlem-based Malcolm X predicted a frightening future of inner-city racial conflict.World's Fairs have always been collisions of eras, cultures, nations, technologies, ideas, and art. But the trippy, turbulent, Technicolor, Disney, corporate, and often misguided 1964-65 Fair was truly exceptional.

Everyone knows New York City is the culinary epicenter of the United States. And while Manhattan gets Michelin stars and Brooklyn gets blogger hype, real culinary fanatics know that authentic ethnic food experiences happen in the restaurants of Queens. There, New York's celebrated ethnic diversity is the most potent, with more than one million foreign-born residents. This means food lovers can travel the globe without using any vacation time: take a culinary tour of China, sip a frappe in Greece, dine on authentic Italian sausage--all without ever leaving Queens! Queens: A Culinary Passport welcomes visitors to the borough, serving as your guide to more than 40 hand-picked ethnic restaurants and food stands, complete with chef profiles and recipes for recreating signature dishes at home. Also included are highlights of not-to-be-missed hidden spots, like ethnic grocery stores stocked with multicultural essentials, fresh-from-the-sea fish markets, and delis that turn out freshly made mozzarella and sopressata. For Queens novices, the book includes easy-to-follow subway directions and even detailed neighborhood walking tours, ensuring that your next trip to Italy, India, Greece, Latin America, and China is only a borough away.