Author, social critic and "New York City's career elegist" (The New York Times), Jeremiah Moss felt alienated in a town that had become suburbanised and sanitised. Then lockdown launched an unprecedented urban experiment: What happens when an entire social class abandons the city? In the streets made vibrant by New Yorkers left behind, Moss found a sense of freedom he never thought possible. Participating in a historic explosion of protest, resistance and spontaneity. From queer BLM marches to exuberant outdoor dance parties, he discovers that, without "hyper-normal" people to constrain it, New York can be more creative, connected, humane and joyful. In this genre-bending work of "autotheory", Moss gives an account of his renewed sense of place as a transgender man, braiding the narrative with psychoanalysis, literature and queer theory, as he offers valuable insight into the way public space-and the spaces inside us-are controlled and can be set free.

About the Author
Jeremiah Moss is the acclaimed author of Vanishing New York. Winner of a Pushcart Prize, his writing has appeared in n+1, the New York Times, The New Yorker, and the Paris Review, among others. Moss is the pen name of Griffin Hansbury, who works as a psychoanalyst in Manhattan.

Reviews
"In its gentle way this is the most radical book I have read in a long time. It's a tale of daily resistance. There could be another world, and Feral City in all its thoughtful scrappy investigative feeling is a map for the utopian future I would want to inhabit. It's composed uncannily, yep, rhizomatically, out of Jeremiah Moss's own hands-on evocation of home, the disordered place where we're playing and marching." -- Eileen Myles
"This is a sublime and furious love letter to our city during the plague-to the months when we reclaimed our streets and lived most vividly even in the midst of death. A must for every New Yorker, and for everyone who has ever loved a place." -- Molly Crabapple
"Jeremiah Moss grapples with what happened when the private sector left the city at the height of the pandemic, and the people who share public space were left behind. Who is the center of our culture? Who just owns the apparatus? What confrontations are necessary for our integrity as a collective? This story is a memory, a documentary, a personal journey, a political manifesto, a searing critique, a human embrace." -- Sarah Schulman
"The saddest and the most exhilarating book you will read this year. It is an epic of a liberated city, a philosophical investigation, a love poem addressed to at least a million New Yorkers, and a hex flung at those zombies Moss calls the Normals." -- Lucy Sante


Awards
Short-listed for Lambda Literary Award 2023.



Book Information
ISBN 9780393868470
Author Jeremiah Moss
Format Hardback
Page Count 288
Imprint WW Norton & Co
Publisher WW Norton & Co
Weight(grams) 484g
Dimensions(mm) 239mm * 160mm * 28mm