Making Rent In Bed Stuy

Download or read book Making Rent in Bed-Stuy written by Brandon Harris and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2017-06-06 with total page 227 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A young African American millennial filmmaker’s funny, sometimes painful, true-life coming-of-age story of trying to make it in New York City—a chronicle of poverty and wealth, creativity and commerce, struggle and insecurity, and the economic and cultural forces intertwined with "the serious, life-threatening process" of gentrification. Making Rent in Bed-Stuy explores the history and sociocultural importance of Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn’s largest historically black community, through the lens of a coming-of-age young American negro artist living at the dawn of an era in which urban class warfare is politely referred to as gentrification. Bookended by accounts of two different breakups, from a roommate and a lover, both who come from the white American elite, the book oscillates between chapters of urban bildungsroman and a historical examination of some of Bed-Stuy’s most salient aesthetic and political legacies. Filled with personal stories and a vibrant cast of iconoclastic characters— friends and acquaintances such as Spike Lee; Lena Dunham; and Paul MacCleod, who made a living charging $5 for a tour of his extensive Elvis collection—Making Rent in Bed-Stuy poignantly captures what happens when youthful idealism clashes head-on with adult reality. Melding in-depth reportage and personal narrative that investigates the disappointments and ironies of the Obama era, the book describes Brandon Harris’s radicalization, and the things he lost, and gained, along the way.

Download or read book The Gentrification Plot written by Thomas Heise and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2021-12-21 with total page 197 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For decades, crime novelists have set their stories in New York City, a place long famed for decay, danger, and intrigue. What happens when the mean streets of the city are no longer quite so mean? In the wake of an unprecedented drop in crime in the 1990s and the real-estate development boom in the early 2000s, a new suspect is on the scene: gentrification. Thomas Heise identifies and investigates the emerging “gentrification plot” in contemporary crime fiction. He considers recent novels that depict the sweeping transformations of five iconic neighborhoods—the Lower East Side, Chinatown, Red Hook, Harlem, and Bedford-Stuyvesant—that have been central to African American, Latinx, immigrant, and blue-collar life in the city. Heise reads works by Richard Price, Henry Chang, Gabriel Cohen, Reggie Nadelson, Ivy Pochoda, Grace Edwards, Ernesto Quiñonez, Wil Medearis, and Brian Platzer, tracking their representations of “broken-windows” policing, cultural erasure, racial conflict, class grievance, and displacement. Placing their novels in conversation with oral histories, urban planning, and policing theory, he explores crime fiction’s contradictory and ambivalent portrayals of the postindustrial city’s dizzying metamorphoses while underscoring the material conditions of the genre. A timely and powerful book, The Gentrification Plot reveals how today’s crime writers narrate the death—or murder—of a place and a way of life.

Download or read book Restoration Heights written by Wil Medearis and published by HarperCollins Australia. This book was released on 2019-06-01 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A debut novel about a young artist, a missing woman, and the tendrils of wealth and power that link the art scene in Brooklyn to Manhattan's elite, for fans of Jonathan Lethem and Richard Price. Reddick, a young, white artist, lives in Bedford-Stuyvesant, a historically black Brooklyn neighbourhood besieged by gentrification. He makes rent as an art handler, hanging expensive works for Manhattan's one percent, and spends his free time playing basketball at the local Y rather than putting energy into his stagnating career. He is also the last person to see Hannah before she disappears. When Hannah's fiance, scion to an old-money Upper East Side family, refuses to call the police, Reddick sets out to learn for himself what happened to her. The search gives him a sense of purpose, pulling him through a dramatic cross section of the city he never knew existed. The truth of Hannah's fate is buried at the heart of a many-layered mystery that, in its unraveling, shakes Reddick's convictions and lays bare the complicated machinations of money and power that connect the magisterial town houses of the Upper East Side to the unassuming brownstones of Bed-Stuy. Restoration Heights is both a page-turning mystery and an in-depth study of the psychological fallout and deep racial tensions that result from economic inequality and unrestricted urban development. In lyrical, addictive prose, Wil Medearis asks the question: In a city that prides itself on its diversity and inclusivity, who has the final say over the future? Is it long-standing residents, recent transplants or whoever happens to have the most money? Timely, thought-provoking and sweeping in vision, Restoration Heights is an exhilarating new entry in the canon of great Brooklyn novels.

Download or read book The Edge Becomes the Center written by DW Gibson and published by Abrams. This book was released on 2015-05-12 with total page 243 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This “generous, vigorous, and enlightening look at class and space in New York” examines the human side of gentrification—“a joy to read” (The Paris Review).For years, journalists, policymakers, critics, and historians have tried to explain just what happens when new money and new residents flow into established neighborhoods. But now, “Mr. Gibson lets the city speak for itself, and it speaks with charm, swagger and heartening resilience” (The New York Times). The Edge Becomes the Center captures, in their own words, the stories of people?brokers, buyers, sellers, renters, landlords, artists, contractors, politicians, and everyone in between?who are shaping and being shaped by the new New York City. In this extraordinary oral history, Gibson shows us what urban change looks and feels like by exposing us to the voices of the people living through it. Drawing on the plainspoken, casually authoritative tradition of Jane Jacobs and Studs Terkel, The Edge Becomes the Center is an inviting and essential portrait of the way we live now.

Download or read book All the Sad Young Literary Men written by Keith Gessen and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2008-04-10 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: By the author of A Terrible Country and Raising Raffi, a novel of love, sadness, wasted youth, and literary and intellectual ambition—"wincingly funny" (Vogue) Keith Gessen is a brave and trenchant new literary voice. Known as an award-winning translator of Russian and a book reviewer for publications including The New Yorker and The New York Times, Gessen makes his debut with this critically acclaimed novel, a charming yet scathing portrait of young adulthood at the opening of the twenty-first century. The novel charts the lives of Sam, Mark, and Keith as they overthink their college years, underthink their love lives, and struggle to find a semblance of maturity, responsibility, and even literary fame.

Download or read book Awkwafina's NYC written by Nora Lum and published by Potter Style. This book was released on 2015-04-14 with total page 716 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Walking shoes? Check. Metrocard? Check. Sombrero? (Just a suggestion.) ONWARD! Let Awkwafina—the Queens-born rap artist of “NYC Bitches” fame—be your guide to the hidden gems of New York City (natives, we’re talking to you, too.) with 10 walking tour adventures that you don’t need a trust fund to enjoy. Travel back in time exploring revolutionary-era Tottenville or Louis Armstrong's house in Corona. Gorge yourself on the haute-cuisine of the street-savvy, from authentic pierogi in Little Poland to steam dumplings in Flushing. Roll with Awkwafina, and she’ll show you the neighborhoods you never knew you were missing (and a few you were missing the point of). This edition includes enhaced features that allow you to connect to a map from each checkpoint and plot your next moves at the click of a button.

Download or read book Aftershocks written by Nadia Owusu and published by Simon & Schuster. This book was released on 2021-01-12 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the tradition of The Glass Castle, a deeply felt memoir from Whiting Award–winner Nadia Owusu about the push and pull of belonging, the seismic emotional toll of family secrets, and the heart it takes to pull through. A Most-Anticipated Selection by * The New York Times * Entertainment Weekly * O, The Oprah Magazine * New York magazine * Vogue * Time * Elle * Minneapolis Star Tribune * Electric Literature * Goodreads * The Millions *Refinery29 * HelloGiggles * Young Nadia Owusu followed her father, a United Nations official, from Europe to Africa and back again. Just as she and her family settled into a new home, her father would tell them it was time to say their goodbyes. The instability wrought by Nadia’s nomadic childhood was deepened by family secrets and fractures, both lived and inherited. Her Armenian American mother, who abandoned Nadia when she was two, would periodically reappear, only to vanish again. Her father, a Ghanaian, the great hero of her life, died when she was thirteen. After his passing, Nadia’s stepmother weighed her down with a revelation that was either a bombshell secret or a lie, rife with shaming innuendo. With these and other ruptures, Nadia arrived in New York as a young woman feeling stateless, motherless, and uncertain about her future, yet eager to find her own identity. What followed, however, were periods of depression in which she struggled to hold herself and her siblings together. Aftershocks is the way she hauled herself from the wreckage of her life’s perpetual quaking, the means by which she has finally come to understand that the only ground firm enough to count on is the one written into existence by her own hand. Heralding a dazzling new writer, Aftershocks joins the likes of Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight and William Styron’s Darkness Visible, and does for race identity what Maggie Nelson does for gender identity in The Argonauts.