Ken Schles: Night Walk

Twenty-five years after his seminal 1988 book, , Ken Schles revisits his archive and fashions a narrative of lost youth—a delirious, peripatetic walk in the evening air of an irretrievable downtown New York as he saw and experienced it. is a substantive and intimate chronicle of New York's last pre-internet bohemian outpost, a stream-of-consciousness portrayal that peels back layers of petulance and squalor to expose the frisson and striving of a life lived amongst the rubble. Here Schles embodies the flâneur as Susan Sontag defines it, as a "connoisseur of empathy … cruising the urban inferno, the voyeuristic stroller who discovers the city as a landscape of voluptuous extremes." We see in a new and revelatory for the twenty-first century—a searching tale of wonder and desire, life and love in the dying hulk of a ruined American city.