SONG OF THE CITY
Basic Books
A loving tribute to the thriving American urban landscape and its people
In Song of the City, Nathaniel Popkin launched a literary project of walking, gazing, and listening. Like Joseph Mitchell and Elia Kazan, Popkin discovers the real people who give place meaning and lets literary form follow. “The city in these pages is alive with personal experiences,” he writes, in the introduction. “My city, the city we can imagine to have a pulse, a body, soul, and seed, is replete with people from every corner. My city is their stories. It is a powerful, reckless place. Let it shroud you with the crush of voices.”
REVIEWS OF Song of the City
“Exquisitely literary…celebrates the visceral, can’t-wait-a-second juice that fuels our asphalt home, the undead dead who built everything around us, and the millions of fellow Philadelphians who are, in fact, the kaleidoscopic family with whom we’re spending our one and only life.”
—Carlin Romano, Guggenheim Fellow and author of America the Philosophical
“The finest book about contemporary Philadelphia I have come across.”
—Steve Conn, author of Americans Against the City
“Emotionally honest, authentically rendered. The Year of the Return deftly shifts narratives to tell the intertwined stories of the Johnsons and the Silks, the interracial marriage that inextricably binds them, the loss that shatters them. Nathaniel Popkin has crafted a novel that is both haunting and graceful with a soulfulness that lingers.”
—Diane McKinney-Whetstone, author of Lazaretto
“Embodies the quintessential human experience”
—Midwest Book Review
“This is one of the most beautiful books I have read about Philadelphia; written like a poem, reads like a song. Gives a haunting, vivid sense of a city falling, and its struggle to rise from the fragments of America’s dreams. Highly recommended.”
—Judy Brown, author of Hush