Brandon's review
Up in the Old Hotel by Joseph Mitchell
I remember where I heard of this book; it was in an issue of the New Yorker with an article remembering Joseph Mitchell's mysterious drop-off in production at the magazine. Apparently, after twenty or thirty years of excellent work, he simply stopped writing. He came to work at the magazine every day and appeared to be working in his office for the next ten or fifteen years, but he never produced anything...at least, nothing that was published in any form. This was an excellent collection. It was hard to remember sometimes that he was writing about New York City because of the old, pre-growth explosion settings of Staten Island and the outer Boroughs.
