A Coney Island Reader

Featuring a stunning gallery of portraits by the worldÕs finest poets, essayists, and fiction writersÑincluding Walt Whitman, Stephen Crane, JosŽ Mart’, Maxim Gorky, Federico Garc’a Lorca, Isaac Bashevis Singer, E. E. Cummings, Djuna Barnes, Colson Whitehead, Robert Olen Butler, and Katie RoipheÑthis anthology is the first to focus on the unique history and transporting experience of a beloved fixture of the New York City landscape. Moody, mystical, and enchanting, Coney Island has thrilled newcomers and soothed native New Yorkers for decades. With its fantasy entertainments, renowned beach foods, world-class boardwalk, and expansive beach, it provides a welcome respite from the cityÕs dense neighborhoods, unrelenting traffic, and somber grid. Coney Island has long offered a kaleidoscopic panorama of people, places, and events, creating, as Lawrence Ferlinghetti once wrote, Òa Coney Island of the mind.Ó This anthology captures the highs and lows of that sensation, with works that imagine Coney Island as a restful resort, a playground for the masses, and a symbol of AmericaÕs democratic spirit, as well as a Sodom by the sea, a garish display of capitalist excess, and a paradigm of urban decay. As complex as the city of which it is a part, Coney Island engenders limitless perspectives, a composite inspiring everyone who encounters it to sing its electric song.