“Manhattan is not altogether felicitous for fiction. It is not a city of memory, not a family city, not the capital of America so much as the iconic capital of this century. It is grand and grandiose with its two rivers acting as a border to contain the restless. Its skyscrapers and bleak, rotting tenements are a gift for photographic consumption, but for the fictional imagination the city's inchoate density is a special challenge.”

"Locations: An Introduction" (p. xvi)
American Fictions (1999)

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Elizabeth Hardwick 14
Novelist, short story writer, literary critic 1916–2007

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