Volume 48, Number 18 · November 15, 2001
Lost New York
By Anthony Grafton
Ben Katchor: Picture Stories
by Ben Katchor
an exhibition at the Jewish Museum, New York City,through February 10, 2002
BOOKS BY BEN KATCHOR IN PRINT
Cheap Novelties: The Pleasures of Urban Decay
by Ben Katchor
Penguin, 108 pp., $12.95 (paper)
Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer: Stories
by Ben Katchor
Little, Brown, 106 pp., $14.95 (paper)
The Jew of New York
by Ben Katchor
Pantheon, 97 pp., $20.00; $15.00 (paper)
Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer: The Beauty Supply District
by Ben Katchor
Pantheon, 108 pp., $22.00
North of the Guggenheim Museum, New York's Appian Way becomes quiet, intimate, and leafy. But inside the ornate mansion that houses the Jewish Museum, a powerful vision of the city's Manichaean life, its perpetual dance of demolition and construction, unrolls across the walls of a ground-floor gallery. Since the late 1980s, the cartoonist Ben Katchor has been weaving dark, intricate graphic novels about New York—not the gleamingly visible metropolis of the recent booms, the bright archipelago of restaurants, clubs, and town houses, but its backdrop, the dark ocean of faded office buildings, fly-specked cafeterias, and discount stores.
Review, 2575 words
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