Up in the Old Hotel and Other Stories

From Strand Bookstore

The New Yorker's master of 'graveyard humor' offers up this collection of long out-of-print material from 1943-1965, plus some previously unpublished stories added to 'McSorley's Wonderful Saloon.' An enormous collection, with an illuminating author's note that places perspective on one man's lifelong love affair with New York. Includes a new introduction by David Remnick. 736p.

From the Publisher

Mitchell explored a New York City that has now vanished in his four books and his classic reportage for The New Yorker. Mitchell's eccentrics live again in this omnibus volume that contains all of his books and several previously uncollected stories.

Review

Charles Baxter - Entertainment Weekly
"This is an amazing book....Mitchell was one of the best reporters who ever walked the face of the earth; I've never met anyone who didn't like this book. It's lively, funny, and shrewd."

Review

Verlyn Klinkenborg - New York Times Book Review
"[O]f Mr. Mitchell's characters--the bar owners, the Bowery preachers, the gypsies, the oystermen--you must say that he is the occasion for their prose....Mr. Mitchell's art is to elicit history from an enormous range of people, and then to cause their words to fall into a shape that gives the reader none of the agony the unreconstructed reveries of these long-winded men might have done."

Review

Roy Blount - Atlantic Monthly
"[A] welcome one-volume collection of Mitchell's collected works...His richly specific, levelly related sketches of gypsy swindlers, waterfront rat exterminators are still funny, fluid, authoritative, tangy and affecting."

More about the book

Mitchell, the venerable New Yorker reporter, wrote these New York City sketches with a fine mixture of lucidity, grittiness, and wry humor. They include "Joe Gould's Secret," which was made into a movie in the year 2000.