![]() The NewsBar on University Place is a café with rolling news on three television screens above the counter and racks of periodicals, everything from Oprah Winfrey’s O to Time magazine. But there’s also a plethora of juice bars and cafés where your average impecunious writer will feel much more at home. This houses expensive restaurants such as the Union Square Café and Gotham Bar & Grill. A few blocks from the Gramercy is the trendy, studenty area around Union Square. The other combination that went down very nicely was literature and coffee, particularly after a night out. It’s surprising you don’t combine the two more often.” Why can’t literary London pull off evenings like this? As one of my new friends put it: “You Brits invented pubs and have great literature. Punters, publishers and authors were listening to the reading, eating and drinking at the same time. The night we went, Richard Zacks, a native New Yorker, was promoting his book Island of Vice, about Theodore Roosevelt’s stint as police commissioner in the 1890s and his doomed attempts to clean up the town. Every other bar or pub hosts literary evenings, free to all, and among the most relaxed and enjoyable are those at the Half King restaurant in Chelsea, founded by Sebastian Junger, Scott Anderson and Nanette Burstein. Literary New York is not all about drinking strong liquor there’s beer, too. It also serves a great Manhattan cocktail, strong enough to insult your brain several times over. (Salman Rushdie doesn’t just hang out at parties: he currently has 392,870 followers on Twitter.) Café Loup is the place that editors and agents go to discuss deals, and Lauren told us it hosted the National Book Critics Circle “after-after party”. Later, Jill and I moved on to Café Loup in the West Village, where we met Lauren Cerand, an independent publicist and specialist in literary social networking. The Plaza Hotel, where Truman Capote held his Fifties balls The bar snacks there were great for soaking up the vodka. We went past a doorman who greeted Caryl by name, down the stairs to a smart basement room with no windows. North Square is one of those intriguing, hidden bars that New York specialises in, with no obvious signs. Later, we decamped to the North Square bar on Washington Square (where Henry James set his novel of the same name). We sat in a corner by a window, beneath a plaque dedicated to Thomas, and Caryl told us that the Welsh poet reputedly drank 18 whiskies straight before staggering on to the street and later dying, according to the medical reports, of “an insult to the brain”. With its tin roof and wood-panelled walls, it’s a classic New York pub. We started at the White Horse Tavern, where Dylan Thomas drank himself to death in 1953. As a location for exploring literary Manhattan, it cannot be bettered.Ī short cab ride from the Gramercy is one of the best areas for a writers’ pub crawl, Greenwich Village, where we met another New York-based British writer, Caryl Philips. The modern Gramercy Park Hotel is emblematic of New York’s transformation since those days: interiors designed by Julian Schnabel and a Damien Hirst butterfly picture on the wall in the darkened foyer. “When I asked about the blood on the carpet in the foyer,” he told me, “they said it was from the stabbing the night before.” But that was back when this was a seriously scary town. A friend of mine, the Canadian novelist Ronald Wright, once stayed there in the Eighties. We stayed at the Gramercy Park Hotel on Lexington Avenue.
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