Shelly Oria’s final contribution is about a man who wanted to be a better man—the kind of man who’s not a prisoner of his own anatomy, the kind of man who saves a life if he can, expecting nothing in return.
November 30, 2010 Boroughing, Classic, Guest Authors, The Locals
Our guest contributor Shelly Oria’s third contribution is an essay about returning to Tel Aviv to visit her sister.
November 17, 2010 Boroughing, Classic, Guest Authors, The Read
BrooklynTheBorough.com is excited to feature the work of graphic novelist and native Brooklynite Martin Lemelman. Extended through November, he has brought us two extra chapters from his return to Brooklyn series, original work based on his latest novel Two Cents Plain, released in August on Bloomsbury. Here is the final installment.
November 16, 2010 Guest Authors
Our November guest contributor Shelly Oria is also a playwright, and has contributed this excerpt of her original work, Emma’s Undoing. Meet Sergey, Emma and Barco, and their Russian humor.
November 10, 2010 Boroughing, Classic, Guest Authors, Theater
Shelly Oria’s first contribution is Documentation, about a series of kisses.
November 2, 2010 Guest Authors
BrooklynTheBorough.com is excited to feature the work of graphic novelist and native Brooklynite Martin Lemelman. Throughout October he will bring us new chapters from his Brooklyn life, original work based on his latest novel Two Cents Plain, released in August on Bloomsbury. Here is the fourth chapter.
October 27, 2010 Classic, Guest Authors, Multi/Media, Photo, The Read
BrooklynTheBorough.com is excited to feature the work of graphic novelist and native Brooklynite Martin Lemelman. Throughout October he will bring us new chapters from his Brooklyn life, original work based on his latest novel Two Cents Plain, released in August on Bloomsbury. Here is the third chapter.
October 18, 2010 Guest Authors
BrooklynTheBorough.com is excited to feature the work of graphic novelist and native Brooklynite Martin Lemelman. Throughout October he will bring us new chapters from his Brooklyn life, original work based on his latest novel Two Cents Plain, released in August on Bloomsbury. Here is the second chapter.
October 13, 2010 Guest Authors, Multi/Media, Photo, The Read
BrooklynTheBorough.com is excited to feature the work of graphic novelist and native Brooklynite Martin Lemelman. Throughout October he will bring us new chapters from his Brooklyn life, original work based on his latest novel Two Cents Plain, released in August on Bloomsbury. Here is the first chapter.
October 6, 2010 Guest Authors, Multi/Media, Photo, The Read
In the acknowledgments of A Thread of Sky, I list several books that figured in my research. Here are eight more books that helped shape A Thread of Sky.
July 29, 2010 Classic, Guest Authors
In this excerpt from A Thread of Sky by Deanna Fei, the family tour of China is half over, and Irene Shen is starting to give up the hope she’s harbored of finally reconnecting with her daughters, her sisters, and her mother in their ancestral home. Now, just when they arrive in the famed city of Hangzhou, said to be China’s most beautiful, they step off the tour bus into a torrential rainstorm.
July 23, 2010 Guest AuthorsLike many denizens of our prolific borough, I wrote much of my novel in neighborhood coffee shops. Here are the cafes that should have received my acknowledgment.
July 8, 2010 Classic, Guest AuthorsMy novel, A Thread of Sky, is the story of a family of six strong-willed, Chinese-American women who reunite for a tour of their ancestral home, a story inspired by a tour of China that I undertook ten years ago with the women in my own family. I should mention that it was a package tour; that it was my mother’s idea; and that calling the women in my family “strong-willed” is a bit of an understatement. Here is an excerpt.
July 1, 2010 Classic, Guest Authors
Of all the Brooklyn books I like, my favorite is one that does not exist on its own: it’s buried in a much larger novel about World War II and the death camps.
June 29, 2010 Classic, Featured Writers, Guest Authors
On this particular Thursday in April, 1948, City editor Ed Bartnett read a report of an incident in northern Manhattan from that morning that he thought echoed a similar crime related to the waterfront in the West Village the year before. If handled by the right reporter, an investigation might get at the possible links and wider causes of these dock wars. Mike Johnson got his hat.
June 17, 2010 Classic, Guest Authors
Freebird Books will be screening films about the waterfront outdoors on successive Thursdays. Tonight it’s Slaughter on Tenth Avenue. Next week it’s Edge of the City.
June 10, 2010 Classic, Guest Authors
On the afternoon of Friday, July 14th, 1939, Pete Panto left the Moore-Mack pier where he served as hiring foreman at five o’clock and headed home to his rooming house near the Brooklyn Navy Yard. In his room on North Eliott Place he was shaving for a date later that evening with his fiancée, Alice Maffia, when her younger brother Michael came to the room with word that Panto had a telephone call at the corner cigar store. Panto wiped his face and made his way downstairs, but when he returned from his conversation his mood had darkened. He seemed uncharacteristically spooked as he told Michael he would be meeting “two tough mugs” or “men I don’t like” for an hour or so that night, warning “If I don’t get back by ten o’clock tomorrow morning, tell the police.”
June 3, 2010 Classic, Guest Authors
So here’s the thing: I live in Manhattan. I realize this admission may count as blasphemy in these parts, but I spend what seems like several night a week in Brooklyn, and well, there’s nothing like an outsider’s perspective to keep people honest. I also write about Brooklyn a great deal, in both my fiction and non-fiction, so why don’t we start there and see what happens.
May 5, 2010 Boroughing, Classic, Guest Authors
Every third Wednesday, in the middle of the afternoon, the ghost of my Great Grandfather stops into to my favorite bar in Prospect Heights. Inconveniently for everyone, he always sits at the center stool, creating gaps on either side of him as nobody likes getting wet from the splashing beer falling through his translucent body.
April 28, 2010 Boroughing, Classic, Fiction, Guest Authors
As much as Annabelle hated to admit it, the neighborhood really had changed. More progressive types had moved to Brooklyn in the past few years and their liberal antics sometimes made her seriously consider moving back to Montana. Annabelle wasn’t from Fort Greene originally, but she’d lived in the neighborhood a hell of a lot longer than these yo-yos. She was taller and longer than each of them, by at least a foot in both directions. Her tail and claws were much more serious too.
April 21, 2010 Boroughing, Classic, Fiction, Guest Authors
Throughout the five-boroughs, the aliens leveled all apartments, condos, townhouses, brownstones, high-rises, and houses systematically with top-of the line laser death-rays. Afterward, new buildings were constructed, and nearly everyone was relocated to a new apartment; a 10-foot by 10-foot living space with an incredibly low ceiling and a sliver of a window. That is, except for a few railroad apartments in Bushwhick.
April 15, 2010 Boroughing, Classic, Featured Writers, Fiction, Guest Authors
In those days, the best place to drink for free in Brooklyn was in Red Hook at one very specific little art gallery on the night of an opening. It was (and still is) a little shack located at the end of the Van Brunt Street right off the water in the shadow of those big cranes that loom like prehistoric monsters in the mist. Called WORK Gallery, it was painted a deep red either as a reference to its neighborhood, or the result of mild insanity on the part of its owner. In any case, the party was always there.
April 7, 2010 Boroughing, Fiction, Guest Authors
The photographs covering our kitchen table all share a singular theme; they’re portraits of the various stadium lights which surround the perimeter of McCarren Park on the edge of Greenpoint.
April 1, 2010 Boroughing, Classic, Fiction, Guest AuthorsWe’re trading Brooklyns, moving from the thriving, throbbing 24-hour Crown Heights – where the noise of blasting reggae at 3 AM is matched only by the noise of blasting cantorial music at 3 AM – trading it in for the placid, tree-lined, and, yes, backyard-filled streets of Flatbush. My Hasidic friends think I’m selling out and moving to a Modern Orthodox neighborhood. My non-Hasidic friends think I’m selling out and moving to the suburbs.
March 30, 2010 Boroughing, Classic, Guest AuthorsThe way some writers obsess about relationships — whether it’s poets reading poems about how they want to sleep with another poet in the audience, or novelists writing thinly-disguised (or not-disguised) accounts of their trysts/flings/marriages — I obsess about cities.
March 23, 2010 Boroughing, Guest AuthorsThere was a crazy Nor’easter over the weekend, and we had to go to Jersey – an activity rarely on any Brooklynite’s top ten list, and especially not on a rainy Saturday night. But there was a family bar mitzvah, and we are nothing if not devoted to the family.
March 15, 2010 Boroughing, Classic, Guest AuthorsHasidic Jews might not be the number one most-fetishized religious group by the media – my Muslim punk rock friends would probably win that particular medal – but, dammit, we get our fair share of attention.
March 8, 2010 Boroughing, Classic, Guest Authors
The first time I saw Reddog—a lean, Pit Bull mix—I peered through the haze of anxiety and heroin hangover that I then lived in, and thought: now that is a sexy dog. Beauty like his, the kind we call sexy, it pleases some aesthetic instinct, softens something in us, makes us want to look longer, to memorize its implicit promise that there is ease in the world, that some things accord.
February 24, 2010 Boroughing, Guest Authors, Read Features
Nola squints in the sunlight that has just spilled over the rooftops and illuminated Williamsburg’s McCarren Park in all its dewy spring splendor. Slipping her Chanel sunglasses down over her eyes, she sips her latte and makes a sweeping gesture toward the jogger-strewn park, its busy dog run, and the new high-rise condos that have sprung up along its borders.
“There is no way I’d be living here without my nurse hat, if you know what I mean. This place is going to look like Park Slope in a few years. They might dress like hipsters, but they’re just yuppies with vintage wardrobes.”
February 19, 2010 Boroughing, Classic, Featured Writers, Guest Authors
Dear America,
Baby, I love your particular strain of capitalism, how its muscular hand caresses every part of me, everything in sight–I have always loved a firm hand, baby.
I love how it has turned everything into a product, one that looks suspiciously like my own body.
I love how this has made me hate myself, and hawk myself, and fostered an extreme poverty of imagination in my young self, and in everyone I have ever known.
I love how this has forced my imagination to grow bigger…
February 10, 2010 Classic, Fiction, Guest Authors, The People
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