New York Edition Review Novels & Stories

Shawn taped to the front. “Would you like me to give you a ride home?” he asked. Only if it were raining thumbtacks and hairpins, you letch. “No, thanks.” Aya turned back to her computer screen and hoped he’d take the hint. Eventually he wandered off, probably heading for the bar across the street that most of the reporters hit before going home. New York, wasn’t exactly a hotbed of opportunity for any journalist, but Shawn’s big boys sure liked keeping up the appearance of carrying a heavy social burden. They relished cozying up to the bar at Bob’s and talking about the days when they’d worked at bigger, more important papers. For the most part they were just like Shawn: middle-aged, middle

He had a look in his eyes that looked like he was uncertain about something then he nodded and unlocked the door and held it open for me. We sat back down. The food was already served and we dug in. We ate in silence, each lost in our thoughts. The food was amazing though and I let out a small moan. He chuckled. “Do you two need a room?” I rolled my eyes but continued eating. My phone pinged. It was a notification from “SUNRISE” one of New York’s leading publication. The headline instantly caught my attention. "ELIJAH WASHINGTON WITH MYSTERY WOMAN AT THE HOSPITAL."

Summer arrived the way all things worth waiting for arrived without announcement, simply there one morning, the city warmer than it had been the day before, the light lasting longer, the particular quality of New York in June doing what it always did: becoming, briefly, the best possible version of itself. I had been writing for three months.

"The Nordic acquisition analysis is incomplete. Their projections don't account for the currency shift." "I'll take your word for it," Elijah said. A brief silence. The pen moved. "You don't read the business section." "I read the culture section," Elijah said. "And the magazine on Saturdays. Occasionally the food column." "The food column," Alexander said, with the tone he used for things he found inexplicable but wasn't going to argue with. "There was a piece last week about the revival of the supper club model in Brooklyn," Elijah said. "It was genuinely interesting."

As she read the headlines, one news, in particular, left her frozen in her seat. New York’s Most Desired Bachelor has finally Settled Down. She read the entire article, trashing it immediately when she was done. A heavy sigh escaped her mouth as she lay back on her seat, her hand supporting her spinning head. She took the file from her bin and straightened the papers, reading through it again as if in denial.

For now she has to go away again but she will be back. She went to the public bath after collecting some clothes. She is now refreshed and looking as a normal person. As she was passing by a crowded commercial complex a newspaper stand on the side has displayed the paper’s headlines. She had seen it almost every corner of the city. She was filled with disgust that she wanted to spit on every paper where his face is pictured. the photo is captioned: RAYMOND SANDERS, eligible bachelor and CEO of Sanders State Development Corporation, now nominated to run for mayor of New York city.

Nova York — Seven years before. New York is truly incredible, just as Mom described it. The one time she came here was enough to mark her memory. I never understood why she was so fond of this city, but I have come to understand. The letter she left me, the one in my hands, tells everything she went through, how she searched for my father and his family tried to buy her silence... And how, even so, she traveled to New York only to find out about his recent engagement, with a baby in her belly, the fruit of a fling between young people with different burdens.

Richard sat at the edge of a wide window that allowed to him to see a yawning view of the city of New York. Skyscrapers loomed in the backdrop of the gray and ashen city, and just down below, he could make out the heads of the twenty-thousand odd people that regularly walked that road, either going, coming… never at a place. New York. The unsleeping city. It was one of the things that he admired about his quaint, little, overcrowded city. The heat, the bustle, the smooth flow of business. It was so easy to get conned here. It looked easy to make it here, but that was just it. Looks.

The East River was starting to turn a pale, slate gray outside the steel-framed windows, the first indigo streaks of dawn cutting through the humid haze of the New York harbor. "The presses are running," Maya murmured, her voice thick with sleep, her fingers tightening slightly against the fabric of his shirt. She didn't move away; instead, she shifted her weight, tucking her chin into his shoulder so she could look out across the dark floor toward the glowing monitors. "They are," Julian replied, his voice a low, gravelly vibration in the quiet room. "The phase-balancer caught the inductive spike. Your neighborhood chronicle is currently clearing its first hundred impressions."

The New York Times feature published on a Sunday in November. I read it at the kitchen counter in the Capitol Hill apartment at seven in the morning with Eleanor in the carrier against my chest and Julian beside me with his coffee and the Washington November morning outside the window doing what November mornings did which was arrive cold and clear and entirely without apology for what the year had cost to produce them. The feature ran to four thousand words.