Up in the Old Hotel

'Mitchell bottled and preserved more of the soul of New York than any man before or since; Up in the Old Hotel is required reading for anyone who wants to hear the lost voices of the city' Tim Adams, Observer

This is a book about New York as it was a long time ago… Mitchell is interested in the texture of the city. He loves the cops and bums and old Italian restaurants. After a while you really feel engrained in the place yourself

Swift, razor-sharp characterisation, narrative suspense and the sparest, yet most penetrating description

One of the greatest journalists America has produced

What James Joyce might have written had he gone into journalism

A poet of the waterfront and a writer of surpassing tales that captured the unsung and unconventional life of New York and its denizens

If Borges had been a New Yorker he might have come up with something like Joe Gould's Secret

An original... Civilised, intelligent, kind, humorous

[Mitchell’s] portrait of old New York is unmatchable

It is a teeming confection of the kind of people you wish to meet in a city, but would never quite have the guts to spend time with

Comparing a journalist's oeuvre with the titanic Ulysses may appear presumptuous, but Mitchell shared Joyce's obsessive interest in the odd corners and overlooked eccentrics of urban life… Mitchell produced pure gold… his book has some of the finest feature writing published

Mitchell is a superb writer and this collection is a treasure

Joseph Mitchell was born near Iona, North Carolina, in 1908, and came to New York City in 1929, when he was twenty-one years old. He eventually found a job as an apprentice crime reporter for The World. He also worked as a reporter and features writer at The Herald Tribune and The World-Telegram before landing at The New Yorker in 1938. "Joe Gould's Secret," which appeared on September 26th 1964, was the last piece Mitchell ever published. He went into work at The New Yorker almost every day for the next thirty-one years and six months but submitted no further writing.

'The master of a journalistic style long vanished - urbane, lucid, courteous... A masterpiece of observation and storytelling' Ian McEwan 
 
Mitchell is the laureate of old New York. The hidden corners of the city and the people who lived there are his subject. He captured the waterfront rooming-houses , nickel-a-drink saloons, all-night restaurants, the 'visionaries, obsessives, imposters, fanatics, lost souls, the end-is-near street preachers, old Gypsy Kings and old Gypsy Queens, and out-and-out freak-show freaks.' Mitchell's trademark curiosity, respect and graveyard humour fuel these magical essays. 
 
Written between 1943 and 1965, Up in the Old Hotel is the complete collection of Joseph Mitchell 's New Yorker journalism and includes McSorley's Wonderful Saloon, Old Mr Flood, The Bottom of the Harbour and Joe Gould's Secret. 
 
 
'Joseph Mitchell is buried treasure' Salman Rushdie

The Bottom Of The Harbor

Swift, razor-sharp characterisation, narrative suspense and the sparest, yet most penetrating description.

The finest staff writer in the history of the New Yorker and one of the greatest journalists America has produced.

After Joe Gould's Secret - 'a miniature masterpiece of a shaggy dog story' (Observer) - here is another collection of stories by Joseph Mitchell, each connected in one way or another with the waterfront of New York City. As William Fiennes wrote in the London Review of Books, 'Mitchell was the laureate of the waters around New York', and in The Bottom of the Harbor he records the lives and practices of the rivermen, with love and understanding and a sharp eye for the eccentric and strange. This is some of the best journalist ever written.

Joseph Mitchell

Why does the book mean so much to us? It's a masterpiece, of course, but more than that it shows that there is some such thing as being a simple observer

A little masterpiece of observation and storytelling

‘It's a masterpiece, of course, but more than that it shows that there is some such thing as being a simple observer’ Nicci French, Independent 
 
It was 1932 when Joseph Mitchell first came across Joe Gould, a Harvard-educated vagrant of Greenwich Village. Penniless, filthy, scurrilous, charming, thieving, Joe Gould was widely considered a genius. He was working on a book he called an Oral History – the longest book ever written he claimed, formed of recorded conversations set down in exercise books. Of course, when Gould died the great epic was nowhere to be found. 
 
This compelling portrait of a true New York eccentric, a man who embodied the disconnected, delusional nature of real life, was Mitchell’s personal enquiry into the agony of writer’s block. 
 
Joe Gould's Secret can be found in the longer collection of Mitchell's writing Up in the Old Hotel.

Joseph Mitchell

Praise for Joe Gould's Secret

Why does the book mean so much to us? It's a masterpiece, of course, but more than that it shows that there is some such thing as being a simple observer

A little masterpiece of observation and storytelling

Books by Joseph Mitchell

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