At the Strangers' Gate: Arrivals in New York

by Adam Gopnik Narrated by Adam Gopnik

Overview

From The New York Times best-selling author of Paris to the Moon and beloved New Yorker writer, a memoir that captures the romance of New York City in the 1980s.

When Adam Gopnik and his soon-to-be-wife, Martha, left the comforts of home in Montreal for New York, the city then, much like today, was a pilgrimage site for the young, the arty, and the ambitious. But it was also becoming a city of greed, where both life's consolations and its necessities were increasingly going to the highest bidder. At the Strangers' Gate builds a portrait of this particular moment in New York through the story of this couple's journey--from their excited arrival as aspiring artists to their eventual growth into a New York family. Gopnik transports us to his tiny basement room on the Upper East Side, and later to SoHo, where he captures a unicorn: an affordable New York loft. He takes us through his professional meanderings, from graduate student-cum-library-clerk to the corridors of Condé Nast and the galleries of MoMA. Between tender and humorous reminiscences, including affectionate portraits of Richard Avedon, Robert Hughes, and Jeff Koons, among many others, Gopnik discusses the ethics of ambition, the economy of creative capital, and the peculiar anthropology of art and aspiration in New York, then and now.

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly

08/14/2017
Gopnik (Paris to the Moon) moves masterfully between humorous, poignant minutiae of private experience and a macro view of New York City throughout the 1980s. Starting with his wide-eyed move to the city at the start of the decade, Gopnik makes readers feel like Manhattan insiders as he shares stories of how he and his wife moved through low-rent apartments and a parade of quirky jobs, friends, and experiences, culminating in his plum gig writing for the New Yorker. Gopnik is especially adept at writing about episodes both dynamic (a writer’s joy at seeing his words in print, or frantically helping a neighbor stop a damaging leak) and disappointing (the drudgery of being an art reference librarian) as he integrates into some of the Big Apple’s most famous cultural institutions. The Museum of Modern Art, the booming SoHo art scene, and book publishing all serve as sources of his wonder. No matter what the topic, however, whether it is married love, the meaning of physical space (he describes the city’s “basement flats that look out on an airshaft”), or the growing greed surrounding him, Gopnik’s greatest gift is his playful insight (“Tenderness toward one’s lost self is sentimental; tenderness toward one’s lost longings is just life”). (Sept.)

From the Publisher

Always the elegant stylist, [Gopnik] effortlessly weaves in the city’s cultural history.” —The New York Times

“Gopnik can write a beautiful sentence about pretty much anything. . . . [At the Strangers’ Gate] provoked the same reaction in me as all of Gopnik’s work: I am awed by and envious of his craft and simply baffled by the span of his knowledge.” —Duff McDonald, The Wall Street Journal

“A real treat.” —The Times Literary Supplement
 
“The finest book of the New Yorker writer’s distinguished career.” —Maclean’s
 
“Superb.” —San Francisco Chronicle

“[Gopnik’s] loving description of SoHo’s cast-iron buildings, studded with specific detail, brings the neighborhood into sharp visual focus. . . . Character sketches of Avedon and Hughes are equally shrewd.” —The Boston Globe
 
“At the Strangers’ Gate brings a whole decade vividly back to life. . . . A well-oiled and smoothly captivating performance from start to finish, sure to be as beloved as Paris to the Moon but feeling even more personal and involving.” —The Christian Science Monitor
 
“[A] stylish memoir.” —The Philadelphia Inquirer
 
“At once intellectual, casual, observant and thoughtful.” —San Francisco Chronicle
 
“For more than 30 years . . . Gopnik has made the most of sentences and circumstances. With At the Strangers’ Gate, he has done so again.” —Tulsa World
 
“Charming. . . . Gopnik asks readers, as Patti Smith did in Just Kids, to accompany him to another decade. . . . [His] writing, at its best, maintains a dynamic tension between elegance and wisdom, between the true and the lovely. . . . [He is] a formidable stylist, in the tradition of E.B. White, James Thurber and Wolcott Gibbs.” —Toronto Globe and Mail
 
 “A riveting and incandescent chronicle of personal evolution set within the ever-morphing, cocaine-stoked crucible of ferocious ambition that was 1980s Manhattan.” —Booklist (starred review)
 
“Anyone who worries that artificial intelligence might some day outpace the faulty circuitry inside human heads should be cheered by the existence of Adam Gopnik. His brain has nothing to fear from electronic competition. . . . [He] is a sleek stylist, and a high-minded, big-hearted moralist into the bargain.” —The Observer
 
“Gopnik has a way of making daily domestic life both fascinating and moving.” —The New York Post
 
“With humor, affection, and the careful eye of a trained art historian, [Gopnik] offers an enjoyable and engaging story of New York.” —Library Journal (starred review)

Library Journal

★ 07/01/2017
In this memoir, New Yorker writer and essayist Gopnik (Paris to the Moon) looks back at his life in New York City in the 1980s through a series of lenses: his marriage to filmmaker Martha Parker, the apartments and neighborhoods in which they've lived, and the art and food they've experienced. As with many inhabitants of New York, real estate becomes a primary focus for the couple, and their living situations—from a tiny studio to a 1,500—square foot Soho loft—play an outsized role in the author's consciousness. Two chapters stand out as the most striking. The first captures "the experience of being adopted by a charismatic mentor," describing the couple's close relationship with fashion photographer Richard Avedon. The second depicts the changes brought to the burgeoning Soho neighborhood as it becomes the center of the art world. VERDICT As Gopnik writes, "art traps time," and with humor, affection, and the careful eye of a trained art historian, he offers an enjoyable and engaging story of New York at a very specific moment in history.—Doug Diesenhaus, Univ. of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

OCTOBER 2017 - AudioFile

Richly composed and expressively narrated, journalist (THE NEW YORKER) Adam Gopnik’s audiobook is a memoir of sorts. He primarily recounts his and his wife Martha’s relocation from Montreal to New York City in the 1980s. Gopnik is a highly skilled narrator with an expressive, sensitive style. His precise intonation strengthens a story that some might hear as one of luck and family privilege, replete with instances of “showing off.” Too much of the book involves documenting the sizes, varieties, colors, and challenges of the tiny living spaces they shared with New York rats, roaches, and mice. The evolution of artsy SoHo into a neighborhood in which money interests predominate is portrayed within the context of Gopnik’s dual loves—Martha and The City That Never Sleeps itself. W.A.G. © AudioFile 2017, Portland, Maine

Kirkus Reviews

2017-06-13
A longtime New Yorker contributor writes about his early years in the city—the 1980s principally—ruminating about art and artists, love and apartments, writing and reading and speaking, and the city that he loves.Gopnik—the author of numerous works on sundry subjects (The Table Comes First: Family, France, and the Meaning of Food, 2011, etc.)—returns with an affecting memoir about his many dawns: his love life (there is much here about Martha, his wife of many years), writing career, and friendships with significant figures such as Richard Avedon and Jeff Koons. This is a highly allusive text, with references ranging across the cultural landscape, from Anthony Trollope to X-Men, from Falstaff and Prince Hall to professor Irwin Corey. But Gopnik will engage most firmly those interested in the art world of the 1980s. He studied art history, worked as a docent at the Museum of Modern Art, and did his earliest publishing in art magazines. Later, he moved to GQ, where he wrote about men's fashion, then to Knopf as an editor before settling in at the New Yorker, his promised land. The text is also an extensive love letter to his wife—and includes a carefully erotic section about their sex life and about sex among married people in general. Throughout, readers will become aware of the author's great fortune in his career: meeting important people, acquiring jobs that even he knew he was not qualified for—e.g., Knopf and editing. However, Gopnik retains an appealing modesty throughout and has some very entertaining stories to tell, including one about an invasion of rats in their loft (some foul secrets of the city, he learns, lie below). Not exactly a Horatio Alger story but an engaging tale of a writer finding his way in work and life.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940169122909
Publisher:	Penguin Random House
Publication date:	09/05/2017
Edition description:	Unabridged

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Excerpted from "At the Strangers' Gate"
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Copyright © 2018 Adam Gopnik.
Excerpted by permission of Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.
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