Bill Hayes's critically acclaimed memoir Insomniac City provided a first look at his unique street photography. Now he presents an exquisite collection that captures the full range of his work and the magic of chance encounters in New York City. Hayes's "frank, beautiful, bewitching" street photographs "unmask their subjects' best and truest selves" (Jennifer Senior, New York Times): A policeman pauses at the end of a day. Cooks sneak in cigarette breaks. A pair of movers plays cards on the back of a truck. Friends claim the sidewalk. Lovers embrace. A flame-haired girl gazes mysteriously into the lens. And park benches provide a setting for a couple of hunks, a mom and her baby, a stylish nonagenarian . . . How New York Breaks Your Heart reveals ordinary New Yorkers at their most peaceful, joyful, distracted, anxious, expressive, and at their most fleeting--bringing the texture of the city to vivid life. Woven through with Hayes's lyric reflections, these photos will, like the city itself, break your heart by asking you to fall in love.

Winner of the New York City Book Award From the beloved author of Insomniac City, a poignant and profound tribute in stories and images to a city amidst a pandemic. When the Covid-19 pandemic hit the United States in March 2020 and New York went into total lockdown, writer and photographer Bill Hayes hit the largely deserted streets of Manhattan to try to document-through words and photographs-how the city was changing virtually overnight. How We Live Now records those first 100 days of the pandemic in real time-a time of both hopefulness and great fear, long before we had effective Covid testing and vaccines-up to and including the historic Blacks Lives Matter demonstrations following the tragic murder of George Floyd. Featuring Hayes's inimitable street photographs, How We Live Now chronicles an unimaginable moment in time with his signature insight and grace, offering a glimpse at our shared humanity.

Amazon's Best Biographies and Memoirs of the Year List A moving celebration of what Bill Hayes calls "the evanescent, the eavesdropped, the unexpected" of life in New York City, and an intimate glimpse of his relationship with the late Oliver Sacks. "A beautifully written once-in-a-lifetime book, about love, about life, soul, and the wonderful loving genius Oliver Sacks, and New York, and laughter and all of creation."--Anne Lamott Bill Hayes came to New York City in 2009 with a one-way ticket and only the vaguest idea of how he would get by. But, at forty-eight years old, having spent decades in San Francisco, he craved change. Grieving over the death of his partner, he quickly discovered the profound consolations of the city's incessant rhythms, the sight of the Empire State Building against the night sky, and New Yorkers themselves, kindred souls that Hayes, a lifelong insomniac, encountered on late-night strolls with his camera. And he unexpectedly fell in love again, with his friend and neighbor, the writer and neurologist Oliver Sacks, whose exuberance--"I don't so much fear death as I do wasting life," he tells Hayes early on--is captured in funny and touching vignettes throughout. What emerges is a portrait of Sacks at his most personal and endearing, from falling in love for the first time at age seventy-five to facing illness and death (Sacks died of cancer in August 2015). Insomniac City is both a meditation on grief and a celebration of life. Filled with Hayes's distinctive street photos of everyday New Yorkers, the book is a love song to the city and to all who have felt the particular magic and solace it offers.

A searing portrait of the racial dynamics that lie inescapably at the heart of our nation, told through the turbulent history of the city of St. Louis. From Lewis and Clark's 1804 expedition to the 2014 uprising in Ferguson, American history has been made in St. Louis. And as Walter Johnson shows in this searing book, the city exemplifies how imperialism, racism, and capitalism have persistently entwined to corrupt the nation's past. St. Louis was a staging post for Indian removal and imperial expansion, and its wealth grew on the backs of its poor black residents, from slavery through redlining and urban renewal. But it was once also America's most radical city, home to anti-capitalist immigrants, the Civil War's first general emancipation, and the nation's first general strike—a legacy of resistance that endures. A blistering history of a city's rise and decline, The Broken Heart of America will forever change how we think about the United States.

A poetic picture book about being able to say goodbye to those we love, while holding them in memory. We continue to be told that there just aren't enough books available for children on loss and grief. This book offers a story that is about not only the death of a beloved old person, but also the duality of life itself, composed as it is of light and dark. Indeed, the story is just as much about the coexistence of these two things as about loss. Accessible, gently frank and philosophic, this book should have strong appeal in the school and library market as well as among all professionals who work with children, along with their caregivers. A strong, lovely text makes this book a standout. A large need exists for books like this. Very well conceived in regard to the audience -- the children -- it is meant to reach.

In Only Love Can Break Your Heart, David Samuels writes with a reportorial acumen and stylistic flair that recall the pioneering New Journalism of Gay Talese, Tom Wolfe, and Joan Didion. Combining elegant, nuanced personal essays with far–out reporting—on the lives of radicals in the Pacific Northwest, anti–abortion zealots, demolition experts, suburban hip–hop stars, and more—Samuels shows us an American landscape whose unsettling mix of profound dislocations and blue–sky optimism is both instantly recognizable and thrillingly new. These essays display his unusual sensitivity to both the tragic and comic dissonances that bubble up from the gap between the American promise of endless nirvana and the lives of salesman, dreamers, aging baseball legends, crackpots, atomic test site workers, and dog track bettors who struggle to live out their dreams one day at a time.

A grieving girl. An unexpected boy. A perfect love story . . . until it isn't perfect at all. Sometimes a broken heart is all you need to set you free...Reiko loves the endless sky and electric colors of the Californian desert. It is a refuge from an increasingly claustrophobic life of family pressures and her own secrets. Then she meets Seth, a boy who shares a love of the desert and her yearning for a different kind of life. But Reiko and Seth both want something the other can't give them. As summer ends, things begin to fall apart. But the end of love can sometimes be the beginning of you...