Capital : New York, Capital of the 20th Century Paperback / softback

Here is a kaleidoscopic assemblage and poetic history of New York: an unparalleled and original homage to the city, composed entirely of quotations.

Drawn from a huge array of sources-histories, memoirs, newspaper articles, novels, government documents, emails-and organized into interpretive categories that reveal the philosophical architecture of the city, Capital is the ne plus ultra of books on the ultimate megalopolis. It is also a book of experimental literature that transposes Walter Benjamin's unfinished magnum opus of literary montage on the modern city, The Arcades Project, from 19th-century Paris to 20th-century New York, bringing the streets to life in categories such as "Sex," "Commodity," "Downtown," "Subway," and "Mapplethorpe."Capital is a book designed to fascinate and to fail-for can a megalopolis truly be written?

Can a history, no matter how extensive, ever be comprehensive?

Each reading of this book, and of New York, is a unique and impossible passage.