New York

New York writers here work a city that is also a set of neighborhoods, and the writing follows the geography. Colson Whitehead, Jennifer Egan and Jonathan Lethem are here, alongside poets, memoirists and graphic novelists. Some of these authors were born in the five boroughs, others moved in and stayed.

When it comes to New York writers, the range runs from Amy Tan to Eileen Myles, from Hernan Diaz to April Bernard. The city is the common material, not the common style.

What separates the New York listings from the California, Texas or Illinois ones is the street. Colson Whitehead writes the city as a machine that keeps rebuilding itself, and Jennifer Egan writes it as a set of overlapping times, so a walk downtown becomes a walk through several decades at once. Hernan Diaz works the same ground from the financial side, where the city is a ledger. Colum McCann and Jonathan Lethem both take the boroughs as their subject rather than their backdrop. The poets here, Paul Muldoon and Tina Chang, treat the skyline and the subway as ordinary weather. For readers who want the city at a smaller scale, Gabrielle Bell draws it panel by panel, and Jamel Brinkley and Jane Bernstein stay on a single block until it opens. Amy Tan and Jennifer Finney Boylan write New York as a place people arrive at and are changed by, which is a different book from one about people who never left.