This literary anthology celebrates the history and romance of Coney Island with works by some of the 19th and 20th centuries’ greatest authors and poets. Featuring a stunning gallery of portraits by the world's finest poets, essayists, and fiction writers--including Walt Whitman, Stephen Crane, José Martí, Maxim Gorky, Federico García Lorca, Isaac Bashevis Singer, E. E. Cummings, Djuna Barnes, Colson Whitehead, Robert Olen Butler, and Katie Roiphe—this anthology illuminates the unique history and transporting experience of New York City’s quintessential beach destination. Moody, mystical, and enchanting, Coney Island has thrilled newcomers and soothed native New Yorkers for decades. Its fantasy entertainments, renowned beach foods, world-class boardwalk, and expansive beach offer a kaleidoscopic panorama of people, places, and events that have inspired writers of all types and nationalities. It becomes, as Lawrence Ferlinghetti once wrote, "a Coney Island of the mind."

Featuring a stunning gallery of portraits by the world's finest poets, essayists, and fiction writers - including Walt Whitman, Stephen Crane, José Martí, Maxim Gorky, and Katie Roiphe - this anthology focusses on the unique history and transporting experience of a beloved fixture of the New York City landscape. It captures the highs and lows of the place, with works that picture it as a restful resort, a playground for the masses and a symbol of America's democratic spirit, as well as a Sodom by the sea, a garish display of capitalist excess and a paradigm of urban decay.

Denson gives us an insider's look at one of New York's best-known neighborhoods, weaving together memories of his childhood adventures with colorful stories of the area's past and interviews with local personalities, all brought to life by hundreds of photographs, detailed maps, and authentic memorabilia.

Twenty-nine poems from the 1950's.

A portrait of the pioneering entrepreneur who designed and built Luna Park - which in 1903 transformed Coney Island into a respectable venue for middle-class recreation - and created the Hippodrome, the world's largest theater when it opened in 1905, filling it with lavish spectacles at affordable ticket prices. The author also explores the development of the idea of adult amusements in America during Thompson's day, and ours.

Coney Island: the name still resonates with a sense of racy Brooklyn excitement, the echo of beach-front popular entertainment before World War I. Amusing the Million examines the historical context in which Coney Island made its reputation as an amusement park and shows how America's changing social and economic conditions formed the basis of a new mass culture. Exploring it afresh in this way, John Kasson shows Coney Island no longer as the object of nostalgia but as a harbinger of modernity--and the many photographs, lithographs, engravings, and other reproductions with which he amplifies his text support this lively thesis.

In March of 2020 the Covid 19 quarantine in Brooklyn was extreme. For people without cars and wary of public transportation life was very limited. In August we finally started riding the subway again and going down to a quiet Coney Island was a real treat. All the rides sat silent for a whole year. The collection of fisherman, homeless people and locals felt like an odd post-apocalyptic community. Everyone was very chatty when we were drawing and I heard a lot of stories. And not only people told stories?. During its year of sleep, Coney Island nourished us.

In the spirit of The Orphan Train and Before We Were Yours, a historical debut about a nurse who chooses to save a baby's life, and risks her own in the process, exploring the ties of motherhood and the little-known history of Coney Island and America's first incubators. A nurse's choice. A daughter's search for answers. New York City, 1926. Nurse Althea Anderson's heart is near breaking when she witnesses another premature baby die at Bellevue Hospital. So when she reads an article detailing the amazing survival rates of babies treated in incubators in an exhibit at Luna Park, Coney Island, it feels like the miracle she has been searching for. But the doctors at Bellevue dismiss Althea and this unconventional medicine, forcing her to make a choice between a baby's life and the doctors' wishes that will change everything. Twenty-five years later, Stella Wright is falling apart. Her mother has just passed, she quit a job she loves, and her marriage is struggling. Then she discovers a letter that brings into question everything she knew about her mother, and everything she knows about herself. The Light of Luna Park is a tale of courage and an ode to the sacrificial love of mothers.

'A poignant, piercing meditation on middle age and the passing of time... will linger with you long after the book is closed' Guardian *SHORTLISTED FOR THE ENCORE AWARD 2020* On a bitterly cold winter’s afternoon, Michael and Caitlin escape their unhappy marriages to keep an illicit rendezvous. Once a month, for the past quarter of a century, Coney Island has been their haven; these precious, hidden hours their only nourishment. But now, amid the howling of an angry snowstorm, the shut-down, out-of-season resort feels like the edge of the world. And their lives, suddenly, are on the brink – with news of serious illness on one side, and a move to the Midwest on the other.

Describes the story of a group of people from the Philippines who were transported to Coney Island in 1905 to be portrayed as “headhunting, dog-eating savages” in a Luna Park freak show.