The Heart of the World

“The history of Broadway has been written before, but never better. . . . The verbal energy that pours off these pages is enough to transform the hell of…Times Square into a rough-hewn heaven, neon lit and open all night. . . . The only thing wrong with this book is it isn’t longer.” —Newsweek

Nik Cohn ushers readers along the street he calls “The Heart of the World.” producing a book that is a resplendent pageant of New York’s high—and low—life. Among the characters we meet are a golden-tongued cab driver who calls himself a “collector of farces”; a pickpocket with the terrifying gift of impersonating his marks; a heartbreakingly beautiful Dominican transvestite named Lush Life; strippers; pseudo-prophets; and a disgraced political veteran of the days when the graft was still honest. Conducted by a writer with the manic energy of a sideshow barker and the full-blooded lyricism of a raucous poet, this is a bebop odyssey along the Great White Way that reaches in implication far beyond the streets of New York to document the ever-evolving mixtures that make up America itself.

“A lovely, bracing book, full to bursting with juicy, tasty, rancid life. While making its bawdy way through crowded spaces . . . it also travels through modern times . . . wondrous.” —USA TODAY