City Lights

In this evocative, intimate, piercing and often funny book, "New York Times" reporter and columnist Dan Barry discovers the city at its most ordinary and most extraordinary. Barry has an eye for the unusual, and an ear attuned to the whispers beneath the city's din. He captures the denizens of Fulton's Fish Market on the eve of its closing; travels through New York's closed-off underground of abandoned subway stops, tunnels, and aqua ducts; and talks to the ex-athlete who caught the falling baby, the performance artist who works as a mermaid, the octogenarian dancers who find quiet joy doing what once made them famous, and the guy who waves flags on the Cross-Bronx Expressway. Each story in this book is a facet of New York: always changing, always losing and renewing parts of itself, every street comer an opportunity for surprise and revelation.