Eric Darton’s Notes of a New York Son, 1995-2007 narrates a crucial period of trauma and transformation in the city’s recent past. Delivered in a voice that is as intimate as it is historically grounded, this five-volume cultural memoir (to be published between 2010 and 2012) extends into the twenty-first century the lineage of urban observer-participants whose literary ranks include Pepys, Defoe, Whitman, Baudelaire, Benjamin, O’Hara and Ferlinghetti.

Praise for Notes of a New York Son

“Eric Darton is the walker in the city (cities) of his generation.”
—Thomas Mermall, author of Semillas de gracia (Pretextos, 2011)

“In Notes of a New York Son, Darton goes charging up and down those streets with that peculiarly bouncy long stride of his, and, through his recording of it, I am the proverbial birdie on his shoulder, reliving my own travels on those streets… Yet signs of danger are all over the place. Some of us bear witness to them, front seat; some cling to other details while, like a Breugel painting, Icarus falls from the sky. Maybe the sky itself is falling: we brush off the ash, the bits and pieces. Skip the crystal ball – I remember Darton reiterating the old cliché over Gamin’s kick-your-ass morning coffee, ‘Prima, remember the Chinese curse: may you live in interesting times.’ The trick is not to look away. He doesn’t.”
—Bronwyn Mills, author of Beastly’s Tale (Rocky Shore Books, 2011)

“Notes of a New York Son is Eric Darton’s journal of his personal and communal life, written with the keen sight of a writer, the humor and irony of a political observer, the complexity of a cultural historian and more. We need not perform textual semiotics on this extremely intelligent writer’s journal but only need to be grateful for it and appreciate its entering the field of historical journals of Great Cities.”
—Gioia Timpanelli, American Book Award winner and author of What Makes a Child Lucky (WW Norton)

“Notes of a New York Son is a survival manual, a spiritual foraging guide for urban dwellers, demonstrating how to draw nutrients and sustenance from the city around them.”
— A brilliant but strategically anonymous multi-genre author

FICTION

A novel of Utopia as seen through a painter's eye.

“It doesn’t happen often—maybe once in a few decades—that a literary work changes the landscape, showing the world that there’s a new way to write, a new way to read and think. Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury might be an example. Other possible candidates: Pynchon’s Crying of Lot 49,  Nabokov’s Lolita.

Eric Darton’s novel Orogene is in this very select league: an amazing fusion of poetry, fun, nightmare, and meditation on the human condition.

It is reported that the Soviet editor Tvardovsky, when the manuscript of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, by an ex-convict named Solzhenitsyn, was placed in his hands and he began to read, stopped, got up, put on his finest clothes before returning to the novel. As I read Orogene, I thought often of Tvardovsky: the rare privilege of getting to turn the pages of a masterpiece before it enters the world in print.

What I told Darton was pretty much what Tvardovsky told Solzhenitsyn: ‘You have written a marvelous thing.’”

—Michael Kandel, editor (for Harcourt) of Ursula K. Le Guin and Jonathan Lethem and translator of Stanislaw Lem

Click to hear an excerpt

“Darton’s seductive fable is a stylistic tour de force, a dazzling parable about the birth of the modern age with its terrors and promise....this debut novel is reminiscent of Italo Calvino’s work in its dashing mingling of history and fantasy.”

—Publishers Weekly

“Darton’s Free City warns of something so evident that it is difficult to see: if the foundations of a ‘free city’ - a society - are undermined, it can be lead to ruin. This tricky, delirious fable for our times - fraught with profound and uncertain change, in which the alliance between unimpeded technology and capitalism drags us blind into the new millennium - carries a strong moral and political load. But Darton’s narrative refuses pessimism, arguing that collective freedom is capable of defending itself with the magic fluid of a mind truly free and sovereign.”

—Roberto Saladrigas, La Vanguardia, Barcelona

A time-traveling saga of friendship and manipulation told in a cycle of twelve animal fables. Featuring original illustrations by Katie Kehrig.

Click to hear an excerpt

Scroll of Wonders

Two free, downloadable, nonfiction narratives of the extraordinary times we are living through.

• Several short and novella-lengh fictions.

• A sampler of music and spoken words recordings made once upon a time in the innocent ’80s.

“Only two things are sure: New York is in rapid motion, and this book is a great guide to where it might be headed. Its diverse array of observations-written by some of the country’s smartest (and wittiest) analysts and activists-are incisive and accessible, provocative and entertaining, perfect for an urban studies course and for anyone interested in pondering the past and future of cities.”

—Mike Wallace, Pulitzer Prize-winning co-author of Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898

“Drawing on the enormous resources of New York's literary community, 110 Stories: New York Writes After September 11 is a surprisingly supple commemoration of disaster. Short-short stories and poems by New York writers are the collection's raison d'être.... Overall, this collection proves the transformative power of art.”

—Publishers Weekly

“Amid the flood of glossy picture books memorializing September 11 comes a rare collection of essays on the fallen World Trade Towers. Written by social critics and urbanists, the essays provide a multidimensional portrait of the towers and New York in the aftermath of September 11. The Lower Manhattan site is presented as a complex, contested landscape rich in historical, social, and political context.... Global and local in outlook, reaching beyond the personal-tragedy, American-values perspective that has dominated the media, this thoughtful volume is not just for New Yorkers.”

—Philip Herbst, Booklist

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