Essays, poetry and impressions
 

Phillip Lopate (ed) Writing New York (Library of America, US). A massive literary anthology taking in both fiction and non-fiction writings on the city, and with selections from everyone from washington Irving to Tom Wolfe.

Frederico Garcia Lorca   Poet in New York (Penguin/Grove Weidenfeld, o/p). The Andalucian poet and dramatist spent nine months in the city around the time of the Wall Street Crash. This collection of over thirty poems reveals his feelings on the brutality, loneliness, greed, corruption, racism and mistreatment of the poor.

Joseph Mitchell   Up in the Old Hotel (Random House, US). Mitchell's collected essays (he calls them stories), all of which appeared in the New Yorker , are works of a sober if manipulative genius. Mitchell depicts characters and situations with a reporter's precision and near-perfect style - he is the definitive chronicler of NYC street life.

Jan Morris   Manhattan '45 (Penguin/Oxford UP). Morris's best piece of writing on Manhattan, reconstructing New York as it greeted returning GIs in 1945. Effortlessly written, fascinatingly anecdotal, marvelously warm about the city. See also The Great Port (Oxford UP).

History, politics and society
 

Herbert Asbury   The Gangs of New York (Thunder's Mouth Press, US). First published in 1928, this fascinating account of the seamier side of New York is essential reading. Full of historical detail, anecdotes and character sketches of crooks, the book describes New York mischief in all its incarnations and locales.

Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace   Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 (Oxford UP). Enormous and encyclopedic in its detail, this is a serious history of the development of New York, with chapters on everything from its role in the Revolution to reform movements to its racial make-up in the 1820s.

Robert A. Caro   The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (Random House, US). Despite its imposing length, this brilliant and searing critique of New York City's most powerful twentieth-century figure is one of the most important books ever written about the city and its environs. Caro's book brings to light the megalomania and manipulation responsible for the creation of the nation's largest urban infrastructure.

Kenneth T. Jackson (ed) The Enyclopedia of New York (Yale UP). Massive, engrossing and utterly comprehensive guide to just about everything in the city. Much dry detail, but packed with incidental wonders.

Luc Sante   Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York (Vintage, US). This chronicle of the seamy side between 1840 and 1919 is a pioneering work. Full of outrageous details usually left out of conventional history, it reconstructs the day-to-day life of the urban poor, criminals and prostitutes with a shocking clarity. Sante's prose is poetic and nuanced, his evocations of the seedier neighborhoods, their dives and pleasure-palaces, quite vivid.

Art, architecture and photography
 

H. Klotz (ed) New York Architecture 1970-1990 (Prestel/Rizzoli). Extremely well-illustrated account of the shift from modernism to postmodernism and beyond.

Jacob Riis   How the Other Half Lives (Dover/Hill & Wang). Republished photojournalism reporting on life in the Lower East Side at the end of the nineteenth century. Its original publication awakened many to the plight of New York's poor.

Stern, Gilmartin, Mellins; Stern, Gilmartin, Massengale; Stern, Mellins, Fishman   New York 1900; 1930; 1960 (Rizzoli, US). These three exhaustive tomes, subtitled "Metropolitan Architecture and Urbanism," contain all you'd ever want or need to know about architecture and the organization of the city. The facts are dazzling and numbing, the photos nostalgia-inducing.

N. White and E. Willensky (eds) AIA Guide to New York (Macmillan/Harcourt Brace). Perhaps even more than the above, the definitive contemporary guide to the city's architecture, far more interesting than it sounds, and useful as an on-site reference.

Gerard R. Wolfe   New York: A Guide to the Metropolis (McGraw-Hill, US). Set up as a walking tour, this is a little more academic - and less opinionated - than others, but it does include some good stuff on the outer boroughs. Also informed historical background.

Fiction
 

Martin Amis   Money (Penguin/Viking Penguin). Following the wayward movements of degenerate film director John Self between London and New York, a weirdly scatological novel that's a striking evocation of 1980s excess.

James Baldwin   Another Country (Penguin/ Vintage). Baldwin's best-known novel, tracking the feverish search for meaningful relationships among a group of 1960s New York bohemians. The so-called liberated era in the city has never been more vividly documented - nor its knee-jerk racism.

Truman Capote   Breakfast at Tiffany's (Penguin/Random House). Far sadder and racier than the movie, this novel is a rhapsody to New York in the early 1940s, tracking the dissolute youthful residents of an uptown apartment building and their movements about town.

Chester Himes   The Crazy Kill (Canongate Pub Ltd). Himes wrote violent, fast-moving and funny thrillers set in Harlem; this and Cotton Goes to Harlem are among the best.

Henry James   Washington Square (Penguin/Viking Penguin). Skillful and engrossing examination of the mores and strict social expectations of New York genteel society in the late nineteenth century.

Joyce Johnson   Minor Characters (Penguin). Women were never a prominent feature of the Beat generation; its literature examined a male world through strictly male eyes. This book, written by the woman who lived for a short time with Jack Kerouac, redresses the balance superbly; there's no better novel on the Beats in New York.

Jay McInerney   Bright Lights, Big City (Flamingo/Vintage). A trendy, "voice of a generation" book when it came out in the 1980s, it follows a struggling New York writer in his job as a fact-checker at an literary magazine, and from one cocaine-sozzled nightclub to another. Amusing now, as it vividly captures the times.

Henry Miller   Crazy Cock (HarperCollins/Grove Weidenfeld, o/p). Semiautobiographical work of love, sex and angst in Greenwich Village in the 1920s. The more easily available trilogy of Sexus, Plexus and Nexus (HarperCollins/Grove) and the famous Tropics duo ( &of Cancer, &of Capricorn ) contain generous slices of 1920s Manhattan sandwiched between the bohemian life in 1930s Paris.

Dorothy Parker   Complete Stories (Penguin). Parker's stories are, at times, surprisingly moving. She depicts New York in all its glories, excesses and pretensions with perfect, searing wit. "The Lovely Leave" and "The Game," which focus, as many of the stories do, on the lives of women, are especially worthwhile.

Damon Runyon   First to Last and On Broadway (Penguin); also Guys and Dolls (River City). Collections of short stories drawn from the chatter of Lindy's Bar on Broadway and since made into the successful musical Guys 'n' Dolls .

J.D. Salinger   The Catcher in the Rye (Penguin/Bantam). Salinger's gripping novel of adolescence, following Holden Caulfield's sardonic journey of discovery through the streets of New York. A classic.

Hubert Selby Jr.   Last Exit to Brooklyn (Paladin/Grove Weidenfeld). When first published in Britain in 1966 this novel was tried on charges of obscenity and even now it's a disturbing read, evoking the sex, the immorality, the drugs and the violence of downtown Brooklyn in the 1960s with fearsome clarity. An important book, but to use the words of David Shepherd at the obscenity trial, you will not be unscathed.

Betty Smith   A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (Pan/HarperCollins). Something of a classic, and rightly so, in which a courageous Irish girl learns about family, life and sex against a vivid prewar Brooklyn backdrop. Totally absorbing.

Edith Wharton   Old New York (Virago/Scribners). A collection of short novels on the manners and mores of New York in the mid-nineteenth century, written with Jamesian clarity and precision. Virago/Scribner also publish her Hudson River Bracketed and The Mother's Recompense , both of which center around the lives of women in nineteenth-century New York.