Presents a collection of short stories featuring noir and crime fiction about Staten Island, New York, by such authors as Todd Craig, Linda Nieves-Powell, S. J. Rozan, and Patricia Smith.

“Nersesian’s extravagantly imagined dystopia relies—as did those in Philip Roth’s Plot Against America and Michael Chabon’s Yiddish Policemen’s Union—on an alternate, counterfactual history.”—The New York Times Book Review “Combining sci-fi space/time-warping, Unabomber-style political ranting and an overall air of goose-bump paranoia, this is one turbo-charged trip. . . . A sharp, strange read: Imagine William Burroughs and Philip K. Dick sharing a needle.”—Kirkus Reviews “Brilliant.”—Time Out New York Arthur Nersesian’s six previous novels (including The Fuck-Up, MTV/Pocket Books, which has sold over 100,000 copies) have focused on the tragicomedy of fin de siècle New York City. Here, in his boldest novel to date, Nersesian has broken through into a new landscape that at once fuses the real with the surreal, the psychological with the psychedelic. He lives in New York City.

This book chronicles how the "forgotten borough" has grappled with its uneasy relationship with the rest of the City of New York since the 1920s. The authors analyze the politics behind events that have shaped Staten Island.

Taken in the "forgotten borough" of Staten Island between 1983 and 1984, the photographs in Christine Osinski's (born 1948) Summer Days Staten Islandcreate a portrait of working-class culture in an often overlooked section of New York City. Captured on Osinski's large format 4x5 camera as she wandered the island, her candid portraits of strangers, vernacular architecture and quotidian scenes reveal an invisible landscape within reach of the thriving metropolis of Manhattan. The neighborhoods that Osinski captured are devoid of the skyscrapers, swarms of pedestrians and choking masses of traffic that are a short ferry ride away. Instead, she captures kids riding bikes on open, empty streets, suburban homes with neatly tended yards and the small-town feel of New York's least populous borough. Accompanying the series of images is an essay by Paul Moakley, Timemagazine's Deputy Director of Photography and Visual Enterprise.

Inspired by Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales, this collection of loosely linked tragicomic short stories travels across time to explore defining moments in the island's history, from the 2003 Staten Island Ferry crash and the New York City blackout to the growing opioid and heroin crisis, Eric Garner's murder, and the 2016 presidential election.

In the early part of the 20th century, Staten Island experienced an influx of Greek immigrants drawn to America by the promise of abundant opportunities. They settled in the farms of New Springville and Bulls Head and in the busy life of Port Richmond. Staten Island's Greek Community highlights traditional aspects of Greek culture and exults in the Americanization, accomplishments, and contributions of this group. The historic images in this book capture familiar scenes such as Greek farms and roadside stands overflowing with succulent vegetables, truck farmers venturing into Manhattan to bring their produce to the Washington Market, and the Candy Kitchen in Port Richmond.

"As a kid growing up in Manhattan, William Helmreich played a game with his father they called "Last Stop." They would pick a subway line and ride it to its final destination, and explore the neighborhood there. Decades later, Helmreich teaches university courses about New York, and his love for exploring the city is as strong as ever. Putting his feet to the test, he decided that the only way to truly understand New York was to walk virtually every block of all five boroughs--an astonishing 6,000 miles. His epic journey lasted four years and took him to every corner of Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx, and Staten Island. Helmreich spoke with hundreds of New Yorkers from every part of the globe and from every walk of life, including Mayor Michael Bloomberg and former mayors Rudolph Giuliani, David Dinkins, and Edward Koch. Their stories and his are the subject of this captivating and highly original book. We meet the Guyanese immigrant who grows beautiful flowers outside his modest Queens residence in order to always remember the homeland he left behind, the Brooklyn-raised grandchild of Italian immigrants who illuminates a window of his brownstone with the family's old neon grocery-store sign, and many, many others. Helmreich draws on firsthand insights to examine essential aspects of urban social life such as ethnicity, gentrification, and the use of space. He finds that to be a New Yorker is to struggle to understand the place and to make a life that is as highly local as it is dynamically cosmopolitan."--Publisher's description.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a small group of Jewish immigrants carved out their own vibrant community in Staten Island. Jewish settlers clustered around the Arietta Street, St. George, Bergen Point, and Perth Amboy ferries and built seven synagogues and a Jewish community center. Jewish dry goods, candy, hardware, and men's furnishings stores sprung up along the major shopping areas of Jersey Street and Richmond Avenue. As the Jewish population grew, it expanded into new developments in Willowbrook, Eltingville, and Arden Heights and was able to support a Jewish elementary school.

Of crucial strategic importance to both the British and the Continental Army, Staten Island was, for a good part of the American Revolution, a bastion of Loyalist support. With its military and political significance, Staten Island provides rich terrain for Phillip Papas's illuminating case study of the local dimensions of the Revolutionary War. Papas traces Staten Island's political sympathies not to strong ties with Britain, but instead to local conditions that favored the status quo instead of revolutionary change. With a thriving agricultural economy, stable political structure, and strong allegiance to the Anglican Church, on the eve of war it was in Staten Island's self-interest to throw its support behind the British, in order to maintain its favorable economic, social, and political climate. Over the course of the conflict, continual occupation and attack by invading armies deeply eroded Staten Island's natural and other resources, and these pressures, combined with general war weariness, created fissures among the residents of “that ever loyal island,” with Loyalist neighbors fighting against Patriot neighbors in a civil war. Papas’s thoughtful study reminds us that the Revolution was both a civil war and a war for independence—a duality that is best viewed from a local perspective.