Hometown Glory highlights the backgrounds of your favorite booksellers through the literature they love. For this series, we have selected books which represent our histories and remind us of home. This is Emma, New York City native, author and owner of Books Are Magic.

New York is a funny hometown to have, because you always have to share. Not just with your millions of neighbors, and all the tourists, but because the city looms so large in our collective imagination. What makes New York beautiful, of course, is the chorus of voices, the thrum of a diverse and noisy population, but when it comes time to represent that feeling on the page, I have often felt reluctant to add my own story. Do we need another New York City book to read? Do I need to write one? - Emma

The Colossus of New York by Colson Whitehead

During the spring and summer of 2020, like so many of us, I found that I missed my hometown, despite the fact that I was stuck inside of it. Manhattan looms outside my window, across the river and rising into the sky, but it had never felt so far away. All deeply loved places are palimpsests, but for me, because it is the place that I grew up, New York City is the most layered of cities. Colson Whitehead’s The Colossus of New York is my favorite love letter to the city because it so beautifully describes the cumulative feeling of time passing, the layers of shops and restaurants and loved ones that we all see when we walk down the street, the memories baked into every block.

Desperate Characters by Paula Fox

The other book that I reread during 2020 was Paula Fox’s Desperate Characters, which I love for many reasons–the impulse to befriend a feral cat chief ranks high on the list–but mostly because the characters spend a lot of time walking around Brooklyn at night. The sidewalks, the strangers, the taxicabs, the streetlights. I wanted out, is what I’m saying. Out the door and into the night, out of the house and into the world. Where did I want to go?

I wanted to go to my parents’ house on the Upper West Side. I wanted to go to the diners I had wasted hours in as a teenager. I wanted my long-lost favorite meals, the movie theaters that had closed, the shops that had closed, the life that had evolved and evolved again into my current daily routine. I wanted my city, alive and open.

This Time Tomorrow by Emma Straub

Maybe it’s naive to say that place isn’t always paramount in novels–when thinking about my own novels, none of them could have taken place anywhere else, except maybe The Vacationers, which was of course about people on vacation and therefore what was key was what they were leaving at home–but in This Time Tomorrow, there was no question, no substitute, no fictional facsimile. I love you, New York. Welcome home.

Preorder This Time Tomorrow here to get a signed copy, out May 17, 2022.