Going Into Town: A Love Letter to New York

Brooklyn-born Chast follows up her emotional National Book Award finalist memoir Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant with an expanded version of a guide to Manhattan she made for her college-bound daughter, which enlightens readers on the finer and sometimes obscure points of what makes New York City a vibrant and often loony landscape. Multiple aspects of the city are lovingly examined and lampooned, with a matter-of-fact intimacy that could only come from a native New Yorker, from the bad—why not to get on an empty subway car—to the grand—the expanses of Central Park. Observations and advice on making one’s way through the city’s diversions are mixed with the quirky character that oozes from the metropolis’s every concrete pore. It’s all delivered with obvious and knowing affection and captured with a keenly observant pen. (Oct.)