A Critic’s Tour of Literary Manhattan

Written By Unknown on Jumat, 21 Desember 2012 | 17.35

Piotr Redlinski for The New York Times

Clockwise from left: KGB Bar, the Strand, Nuyorican Poets Cafe, Library Hotel, NoMad Hotel, Algonquin hotel, Café Loup. More Photos »

A FEW years ago, the novelist Gary Shteyngart, whose books are very funny and very sad, gave an interview to a magazine called Modern Drunkard. (Yes, this magazine actually exists.) It's the funniest and saddest interview I've ever read.

In it, Mr. Shteyngart lamented what's happened to bookish night life in New York City over the past decade. "There are so few people to drink with," he said. "The literary community is not backing me up here. I'm all alone." Mr. Shteyngart, who was born in Russia, added: "It's pathetic when I think about my ancestors. Give them a bottle of shampoo and they have a party."

Is Manhattan's literary night life, along with its literary infrastructure (certain bars, hotels, restaurants and bookstores) fading away? Not long ago I installed myself at the Algonquin, the Midtown hotel where Dorothy Parker, Alexander Woollcott and others once traded juniper-infused barbs, and used it as a launching pad to crisscross the island for a few days, looking to see what's left. I made several more nighttime crawls after that. At the very least, I thought, I could inhale the essence of some cranky and word-drunk old ghosts.

Before I started, I reached out to a handful of convivial writers and editors. I wanted their thoughts about why literary Manhattan doesn't seem to have the wattage it once did. Their diagnoses were several. Lorin Stein, the editor of the Paris Review, replied that the smoking ban "was the death knell for a certain kind of protracted hanging out that was once central to literary life in the city."

Daniel Halpern, the publisher of Ecco Press, suggested that the Internet has obviated young writers' need for companionship, gossip and consolation. He added: "The passion my generation felt about poetry and fiction has gone into food, I think, into making pickles or chocolate or beer." Mark Greif, a founder of the literary magazine n + 1, told me that coffeehouses are where writers loiter now, not bars. The writer Sloane Crosley observed that literary night life is almost impossible to observe in real time. "New Yorkers have a delightfully narcissistic habit of assuming," she said, "that if they're not conscious of a scene, it doesn't exist."

Each of these people noted that the bookish crowd has largely dispersed into Brooklyn, where rents are cheaper. I wanted to take in Manhattan as a literary tourist, however. I wanted to touch base with haunts old and new. I wanted to see if there is still, for a certain kind of bibliophilic seeker, as Simone de Beauvoir put it, "something in the New York air that makes sleep useless."

On my first night, I fortified myself with a cocktail at my favorite Manhattan bar, Jimmy's Corner, a scruffy, boxing-themed joint tucked into a wrinkle in Times Square's space-time continuum. It's where one of the bartenders, Mike McGrady, studied at SUNY Binghamton with the novelist John Gardner.

It's also where the staff of The New York Times Book Review, where I was an editor during the 2000s, gathered regularly for cocktails and for drinks-worthy special events, like the time Cormac McCarthy appeared, blinking like a mole thrust into the sunlight, on "Oprah." Happily, the tiny place was crammed.

So was Café Loup, the genteel but unpretentious West Village bistro that continues to bridge generations in terms of its appeal to editors, academics and writers. Its pommes frites with Dijon mayonnaise, its snails and its burger are still nearly one's platonic ideals of these things. When I lived nearby in the late 1990s, Susan Sontag and Paul Auster were among those I'd see there. My editor at The Village Voice Literary Supplement could be found at the bar, drinking pitchers of Côtes du Rhône. These days, Mr. Stein said, "it really is the closest thing I know of to a writer's hangout in the old-fashioned sense."

DWIGHT GARNER is a book critic for The Times.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: December 18, 2012

An earlier version of this article referred imprecisely to Book Row, along Fourth Avenue between Eighth Street and 14th Street. While it has been a long time since the area had about three-dozen used bookshops (the last of those closed in 1988), there is one used-book store along that stretch — Alabaster Books, at 122 Fourth Avenue, which did not open until 1996.


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