City Secrets Books: The Essential Insider's Guide

by Mark Strand (Editor)

Called "the best literary gift to travelers since the Baedeker and Henry James" (Financial Times), City Secrets guides are charming companions to the world’s most fascinating destinations, from cities to movies, offering discoveries from internationally renowned authors, artists, and historians. Books takes this intimate, insider’s approach to literature, featuring 200 brief essays and recommendations by 150 esteemed figures in the literary world, including authors, writers, journalists, scholars, and critics. The list of contributors includes: Oscar Hijuelos, Pulitzer Prize–winning author; John Guare, playwright; Alec Wilkinson, The New Yorker columnist and author; poet laureates Mark Strand and Robert Pinsky; and Kenneth Turan, NPR and the Los Angeles Times film critic, among many others. Fang Duff Kahn Publishers will donate 2% of the purchase price of each book to First Book, a national organization that gives children from low-income families the opportunity to read and own their first new books. It has distributed more than 65 million books to children.

Genres: Books About Books, Nonfiction, Travel

384 pages, Hardcover

First published October 20, 2009

About the author

Mark Strand was a Pulitzer Prize-winning American poet, essayist, and translator. He was appointed Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1990. He was a professor of English at Columbia University and also taught at numerous other colleges and universities.

Strand also wrote children's books and art criticism, helped edit several poetry anthologies and translated Spanish poet Rafael Alberti.

He is survived by a son, a daughter and a sister.

Reviews

[Ian Laird · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a magnificent book in every regard.

I pored over it when I first bought it, marvelling at how few titles I knew and appalled /thrilled that I had actually read a grand total of none. For both these reasons there opened up a range of possibilities to expand my reading range, but before I get to those (shortly) I want to say why I think the book is magnificent:

1. My edition is small in size (pocket size, a bit like Konemann classics), cloth bound with simple silver lettering, printed on lovely semi-glossy paper (I don’t know the technical term) and the book has two silver ribbon place markers for finding your spot

2. The worthiness of the project: Fang Duff Kahn Publishers donate a small portion of the purchase price to First Book, which supplies books (millions of them) to children who would otherwise not have them

3. The editor, Mark Strand, was a man of eclectic taste and good judgement which is reflected in the range and diversity of the contributors: authors, critics, staff writers, academics, poets, television producers, architects, creative directors, reporters and journalists and bookshop managers, to label some

4. These contributors have presented books ‘that have profoundly affected their lives’ which is a pretty good criterion.

How does the guide measure up? Here are some of the books which caught my interest

• A couple of jazz autobiographies: Mezz Mezzrow Really the Blues; Art Pepper Straight Life: The Story Of Art Pepper

• Some film-related materials: Frank Norris McTeague, having just watched Erich von Stroheim's Greed; Dersu Uzala by Vladimir Arsenyev; and the Czech work Closely Watched Trains by Bohumil Hrabal

• Less well-known works from well-known authors: Shirley Hazzard The Transit of Venus; Anita Desai Baumgartner's Bombay; and Evelyn Waugh The Sword of Honour Trilogy

• Guy de Maupassant, because I’ve read some of his Normandy stories recently - Bel-Ami

• Tove Jansson, the much loved Finnish author wrote a book for adults The Summer Book, where Sophia and her grandmother come to terms with each other, rather unsentimentally, on a small island in the Gulf of Finland

• Elizabeth Smart, because her book, By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept, if it is anything near as interesting as her real-life persona ‘Renowned as a drinker, thinker, and eminent wisecracker’, will be absorbing, based as it is on her affair with a married poet

• The Runyonesk The Telephone Booth Indian by A.J. Liebling, about swindlers and sharpies in the Jollity Building in New York in the forties

• He didn’t write much fiction so I jumped at Thornton Wilder The Cabala

• The famed travel writer, Patrick Leigh Fermor, forever associated in my mind with Dirk Bogarde’s impersonation of him in the film They Kidnapped a General, did pen some fiction, and The Violins of Saint-Jacques is an example

• Tommaso Landolfi's Gogol's Wife and Other Stories is a genuine obscure collection of weird, nightmarish tales, which a number of people who ought to know (Italo Calviino, Susan Sontag, Gabriel Annan), say are pretty good, and finally

• Jonathan Coe's What a Carve Up!: a modern satire of the British class system as of the 1980s, including corruption and ruthlessness. Irresistible for me.

Before I made these entries I checked them out on GR and found to my delight that they are all listed, reasonably well-read and in most cases highly rated: half come in at an average above four and only two are below 3.5 (The Cabala and Baumgartner's Bombay). So they are not as obscure as all that and are well-regarded.

Finally, I mention a genuinely obscure title which is a personal favourite on mine, but remains mysterious in a frustrating way. It is Here Before Kilroy, about which next to nothing is known apart from the book itself, by Su Walton, about whom I have not been able to find out anything, not a bio, not a picture. I know nothing of her life at all. She wrote three books: Here Before Kilroy; Horace Sippog and the Siren's Song and The grasshopper in a short period of time (c1968-1970), and then stopped. I would like to know more, know something.

When I was young and naïve, I had a girlfriend, or should I say she had me, who was studying computer science, in the days of punch cards and computers the size of houses. She drove a Trak-yellow Renault 12 and her idea of bush walking was drinking red wine and eating black olives sitting on fold out chairs next to the said Renault parked just off the road.

She handed me Here Before Kilroy with a Mona Lisa smile and said ‘You should enjoy this; there is someone in it just like you.’ I never got to find out which character she had in mind and I did not get the chance to return the volume. It is a wonderful story of flowering adulthood, Norse mythology and music, all swirled together. I thought it magical. I have been chary of re-reading for fear of reducing the value of a fantastic memory.

I wonder what became of the Trak-yellow Renault.

And whatever happened to Su Walton?

[Bob Mendelsohn · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a terrific reference book for a series of recommendations by notable authors. I will be joining in the reading of many of these. My appetite is whetted

[David]

I'm a big fan of reader's guides, and this one has some great out-of-the-way selections in a way that is reminiscent of Noel Perrin's "A Reader's Delight." I won't be reading this all at one go, but look forward to dipping into it now and then in the months ahead.

[Wampus Reynolds · Rating 5 out of 5]

This collection of small essays is a delight. The quality of essays of course varies depending on the writer's skill and/or passion, but the wide array of subjects from different centuries and countries and how they influence and illuminate is what makes reading for me.

I know I shouldn't respond to other people's reviews (or I should since there is that comment button?) but this critique that some books listed are too hard to find is totally illogical and antithetical to the spirit of the book. Who cares if you can't find the out of print travelogue of an island from the 19th century? You now have read someone's love of it!

I've made a list of 32 books I would like to search out from this guide. I'll probably find two or three in my life and read maybe one. But that is fine.

[Kookie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Pretty cool. I got a lot of reading ideas by flipping through the pages of this book.

[Neil · Rating 2 out of 5]

I was underwhelmed by this. I know the point of the book was to identify some underappreciated titles, but these books were for the most point just obscure. A good portion of them are just out of print. The test of a book like this to me is how many titles it adds to one's to-read list, and I didn't find all that many here for mine.