Spaces that Feed the Writing Brain

McSorley’s. 2003.

I just finished Dwight Garner’s “A Critic’s Tour of Literary Manhattan” in The New York Times (December 14, 2012). I’m smitten. I like heady romps through the bars and bookshops where original things take place. I swoon for the places that have suckled and bolstered many a writing generation, and it was Garner’s mission to see how active the scene still is. Certainly, tripping over leagues of high-pitched cookie-cutter blow dry girls on their way to clubs can shake - or stoke - your literary faith in our great city. Every moment is a prompt.

Among Garner’s list of writer’s haunts included McSorley’s, KGB Bar (so restorative, Sunday night readings there), Batali’s Otto pizzeria (imagine!), and the Nuyorican Poet’s Cafe in the Lower East Side.

Read my related posts here on New York at Night and New York Calling: From Blackout to Bloomberg ( eds. Marshall Berman and Brian Berger, University of Chicago Press, 2007).

#writing #Otto #NewYorkCity #bars #McSorleys #NuyoricanPoetsCafe #Literary