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Up in the Old Hotel
'The master of a journalistic style long vanished - urbane, lucid, courteous... A masterpiece of observation and storytelling' Ian McEwan Mitchell is the laureate of old New York. The hidden corners of the city and the people who lived there are his subject. He captured the waterfront rooming-houses , nickel-a-drink saloons, all-night restaurants, the 'visionaries, obsessives, imposters, fanatics, lost souls, the end-is-near street preachers, old Gypsy Kings and old Gypsy Queens, and out-and-out freak-show freaks.' Mitchell's trademark curiosity, respect and graveyard humour fuel these magical essays. Written between 1943 and 1965, Up in the Old Hotel is the complete collection of Joseph Mitchell 's New Yorker journalism and includes McSorley's Wonderful Saloon, Old Mr Flood, The Bottom of the Harbour and Joe Gould's Secret. 'Joseph Mitchell is buried treasure' Salman Rushdie
Joe Gould's Secret
The story of a notorious New York eccentric and the journalist who chronicled his life: “A little masterpiece of observation and storytelling” (Ian McEwan). Joseph Mitchell was a cornerstone of the New Yorker staff for decades, but his prolific career was shattered by an extraordinary case of writer’s block. For the final thirty-two years of his life, Mitchell published nothing. And the key to his silence may lie in his last major work: the biography of a supposed Harvard grad turned Greenwich Village tramp named Joe Gould. Gould was, in Mitchell’s words, “an odd and penniless and unemployable little man who came to this city in 1916 and ducked and dodged and held on as hard as he ...
The Bottom Of The Harbor
After Joe Gould's Secret - 'a miniature masterpiece of a shaggy dog story' (Observer) - here is another collection of stories by Joseph Mitchell, each connected in one way or another with the waterfront of New York City. As William Fiennes wrote in the London Review of Books, 'Mitchell was the laureate of the waters around New York', and in The Bottom of the Harbor he records the lives and practices of the rivermen, with love and understanding and a sharp eye for the eccentric and strange. This is some of the best journalist ever written.
Man in Profile
WINNER OF THE SPERBER PRIZE • NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE AND PUBLISHERS WEEKLY • This fascinating biography reveals the untold story of the legendary New Yorker profile writer—author of Joe Gould’s Secret and Up in the Old Hotel—and unravels the mystery behind one of literary history’s greatest disappearing acts. Born and raised in North Carolina, Joseph Mitchell was Southern to the core. But from the 1930s to the 1960s, he was the voice of New York City. Readers of The New Yorker cherished his intimate sketches of the people who made the city tick—from Mohawk steelworkers to Staten Island oystermen, from homeless intellectual Joe Gould t...
McSorley's Wonderful Saloon
New Yorker essayist Mitchell likes to start with an unimportant hero, but collects all the facts, arranges them to give the desired effects, and usually ends by describing the customs of a community. The subject of one portrait "is a brassy little man who has made a living for the last forty years by giving an annual ball for the benefit of himself." Mitchell doesn't present him as anything more than a barroom scrounger; but in telling his story, he also gives a picture of New York sporting life. "King of the Gypsies" sets out to describe the spokesman of 38 gypsy families, but it soon becomes a Gibbon's decline and fall of the American gypsies; and it ends with an apocalyptic vision that is not only comic but also more imaginative than recent novels. Reading some of his portraits a second time, you catch an emotion beneath them that resembles Dickens'.--From Malcolm Cowley, The New Republic.
Old Mr. Flood
In a fictional portrait of the quintessential old-time New Yorker, retired house wrecker Hugh G. Flood is determined to live to be 115 years old on a diet of fresh seafood, harbor air, and the occasional good scotch.
The Way of Forgiveness
“A unique and special kind of masterpiece.” —John Banville Stephen Mitchell’s gift is to breathe new life into ancient classics. In Joseph and the Way of Forgiveness, he offers us his riveting novelistic version of the Biblical tale in which Jacob’s favorite son is sold into slavery and eventually becomes viceroy of Egypt. Tolstoy called it the most beautiful story in the world. What’s new here is the lyrical, witty, vivid prose, informed by a wisdom that brings fresh insight to this foundational legend of betrayal and all-embracing forgiveness. Mitchell’s retelling, which reads like a postmodern novel, interweaves the narrative with brief meditations that, with their Zen surprises, expand the narrative and illuminate its main themes. By stepping inside the minds of Joseph and the other characters, Mitchell reanimates one of the central stories of Western culture. The engrossing tale that he has created will capture the hearts and minds of modern readers and show them that this ancient story can still challenge, delight, and astonish.
"Man--with Variations"
"I believe the most interesting human beings, so far as talk is concerned, are anthropologists, farmers, prostitutes, psychiatrists, and the occasional bartender." So wrote Joseph Mitchell, the renowned chronicler of New York City's odder citizens. In this series of articles, first published in the now defunct New York World-Telegram, Mitchell weaves together interviews with Franz Boas and his students and colleagues to produce his own compelling set of reflections on the human condition. This is a unique take on a formative period in American anthropology, and will be required reading for anyone interested in the history of the discipline."
