Seven books about New York City’s drastic economic divide

Lee Conell is the author of a new novel, The Party Upstairs. She’s also the author of the story collection Subcortical, which was awarded The Story Prize Spotlight Award, an Independent Publisher Book Award, and an American Fiction Award. She has received a 2020 Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as writing fellowships from the Japan-United States Friendship Commission, the Tennessee Arts Commission, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, Vanderbilt University, and the Yiddish Book Center.

At Electric Lit, Conell tagged seven "books that approached socioeconomic inequality in the city in a way that neither fetishized the wealthy nor seemed to exploit the suffering caused by poverty," including:

A Lucky Man by Jamel Brinkley

A Lucky Man contains nine stories, set mostly in Brooklyn and the Bronx, all of which do a brilliant job of creating narrative tensions around the interlinks between race, class, and masculinity. The story “I Happy Am” is an especially strong example of this: It centers around a group of boys from the Bronx who are driven out to the suburbs, expecting to spend the day at some rich white people home and to swim in their pool. The story twists and turns in a way that beautifully reveals how a kind of performance of gratitude so often plays into power relationships between white people and people of color, and between the wealthy and the working class. At the same time, moments of unexpected tenderness also occur in this story and throughout A Lucky Man, making these stories deeply human even as they tease apart the systems that try to dehumanize many of Brinkley’s characters.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue