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Notable: city stories

 
Published Sept. 2, 2015

Notable

City stories

These books offer new perspectives on cities and the human relationship to them.

Metropolis: Mapping the City (Bloomsbury) by Jeremy Black is a fascinating history of how city maps have been drawn through the ages, from the Renaissance to the present, filled with rich and often beautiful illustrations.

Symphony for the City of the Dead: Dmitri Shostakovich and the Siege of Leningrad (Candlewick) by M.T. Anderson is the gripping true story of how the great composer created his Leningrad Symphony during the horrific bombardment and siege of the city.

Tales of Two Cities: The Best and Worst of Times in Today's New York (Penguin), edited by John Freeman, collects works by 30 major authors, including Zadie Smith, Junot Diaz and Colum McCann, about a city where income inequality is an acute, divisive fact of everyday life.

Colette Bancroft, Times book editor