Feral City

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What happens when an entire social class abandons a metropolis? This genre-bending journey through lockdown New York offers an exhilarating, intimate look at a city returned to its rebellious spirit. In its gentle way this is the most radical book I have read in a long time. It’s a tale of daily resistance. There   be another world, and   in all its thoughtful scrappy investigative feeling is a utopian map for a future I would want to inhabit. It’s composed uncannily, yep, rhizomatically, out of Jeremiah Moss’s own hands-on evocation of home, the disordered place where we’re playing and marching. A sublime and furious love letter to our city during the plague—to the months when we reclaimed our streets and lived most vividly even in the midst of death. A must for every New Yorker, and for everyone who has ever loved a place. Jeremiah Moss grapples with what happened when the private sector left the city at the height of the pandemic, and the people who share public space were left behind. asks the most complex questions: Who is the center of our culture? Who just owns the apparatus? What confrontations are necessary for our integrity as a collective? This story is a memory, a documentary, a personal journey, a political manifesto, a searing critique, a human embrace. The saddest and the most exhilarating book you will read this year. It is an epic of a liberated city, a philosophical investigation, a love poem addressed to at least a million New Yorkers, and a hex flung at those zombies Moss calls the ‘hyper-normals.’ A brilliant story of being lost and finding a place when socially constructed ideas of how people can or should show up are dismantled…. Highly recommended…for anyone who has felt inexorably gutted and remade during the COVID pandemic. [R]azor sharp…shot through with pinpoint character sketches, incisive reportage…and lucid discussion of queer theory, this is a vital contribution to New York City history. A captivating chronicle driven by keen wit, a strong sense of place, and a clear love of a city’s old soul. US

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