constantly being updated: old and new favorite books about cities
Alexandria: Lawrence Durrell's The Alexandria Quartet
Beirut: Samir Kassir's Histoire de Beyrouth
Bombay: Rohinton Mistry's Tales from Firozsha Baag
Cairo: Alaa Al Aswany's The Yacoubian Building
Istanbul: Orhan Pamuk's Istanbul
London: Alan Hollinghurst's The Line of Beauty
London: Xiaolu Guo's A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers
Los Angeles: Sandra Tsing Loh's Depth Takes a Holiday
Los Angeles: T.C. Boyle's Tortilla Curtain
Marseille: Jean Claude Izzo all books
New York, San Francisco and Beirut: Rabih Alameddine's I the Divine
New York: Frank Conroy's Body & Soul
Tangiers: Mohamed Choukri's Le Pain Nu
Vienna: Robert Musil's the Man without Qualities
"I came home on the last train. Opposite me sat a couple of London Transport maintenance men, one small, fifty, decrepit, the other a severely handsome black of about thirty-five. Heavy canvas bags were tilted against their boots, their overalls open above their vests in the stale heat of the Underground. They were about to start work! I looked a them with a kind of swimming, drunken wonder, amazed at the thought of their inverted lives, of how their occupation depended on our travel, but could only be pursued, I saw it now, when we were not travelling. As we went home and sank into unconsciousness gangs of these men, with lamps and blow-lamps, and long-handled ratchet spanners, moved out along the tunnels...." Alan Hollinghurst, The Swimming Pool Library
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