When the City Went Still

It’s publishing season. The books are arriving at the traditional height of the fall deluge, but this year feels slightly different. We’re two and a half years removed from the great global lockdown, those days, weeks, and months when everything went still. That grim time seems strangely distant now, although it wasn’t so long ago. Still, we’re in a different place, however tenuously perched. In my little corner of the world, I’ve noticed a discernible wave of what I would call pandemic-induced tomes. This new publishing category has two subgenres. Books written (in some cases, finally written) because of Covid-19, forged as exercises in mental health. And subgenre two, a slightly smaller sample size, I think, are books written in direct response to the pandemic itself, texts that grapple with the larger meaning of the event.

Michael Kimmelman’s new release, The Intimate City: Walking New York, manages to deftly straddle both genres. The book is a compilat…