The Subway Chronicles

April 2007

Anthologies Online

http://www.anthologiesonline.com/anthologies(2)/The Subway Chronicles.htm

October 19, 2006

Listen to The Subway Chronicles on The Brian Lehrer Show using the player below, or click here to download it from the WNYC web site.

September 26, 2006

CW 11 Morning News

http://cw11.trb.com/news/local/morningnews/wpix-morningtuesday-092606,0,4899420.story?coll=wpix-morning-news-1

September 18, 2006

Gotham Gazette

Gotham Gazette Suggests

This site has been around since 2002, presenting writing about the subway by people who ride it. The writing comes in varied forms -- diaries, poetry, essays, short fiction, and top five lists (top five requests for money, guilty pleasures, ways to ruin an Upper East Sider's day, etc.) For those who prefer to do their reading on the subway, the site recently published an anthology in book form.

http://www.gothamgazette.com/suggests/index.php?swt=2&d=143

September 14, 2006

Queens Ledger

Read About the Subway While Riding It By Phil Guie

For the past three years, "The Subway Chronicles" has been a popular Internet stop for fascinating tales involving New York City's subterranean mass transit system. But last Tuesday, the underground joined the mainstream courtesy of Plume Paperbacks, which published a collection of short works based on the website and featuring the same name. The new book is edited by Jacquelin Cangro, who started thesubwaychronicles.com back in 2002. Like the website, all the short stories and essays in the book version of "The Subway Chronicles" revolve around the titular transportation network, sometimes in unexpected ways.

For example, the contribution from novelist Jonathan Lethem is partially a narrative about his own obsession with the Hoyt-Schermerhorn station, intercut with fascinating bits of history. Meanwhile, in "A Breakup Story" by Francine Prose, a Times Square subway corridor plays an important role in the author's own journey to becoming a writer.

In all, "The Subway Chronicles" book boasts 27 tales, each from a different contributor and straphanger. During a release party last Wednesday hosted by the New York Transit Museum, Cangro explained how she and a group of friends came up with the idea for the original site.
"Some friends and I were at dinner, and we started sharing subway stories," she said. "We realized that everybody who's ever ridden the subway must have stories just like ours."
Cangro, who lives in Brooklyn, credited the subway itself for being so universally-recognized that it has drawn praise and fans from beyond city limits.

"The New York City subway is such an iconic element of New York, like the Statue of Liberty or the Empire State Building," she said. "Our site has gotten visitors from all over the world, and we've [also] gotten folks from elsewhere who visited New York."

Last year, the site featured so many great stories that Cangro decided to pursue the print version. A few of the book's contributors, including Williamsburg's own Stan Fischler, read aloud from their work during the release party, which was attended by roughly 30 fellow writers and museum members.

"We wanted to give readers something fresh," she said. "We talked to our favorite writers who live in New York or used to live in New York, and we said to them, 'Tell me your favorite subway story.' We asked 27 writers, and [received] 27 completely different stories. It shows you how dynamic the subway is."

Cangro declined to share her own best subway story, although she hinted that it might appear in the second "Subway Chronicles" collection, if there happens to be one. Meanwhile, as far as choosing her favorite tale from the first 27, she said that each story is great in its own way - just like the various train lines.

"What's great about subway stories is that there's no way to outdo one another," Cangro said. "Everyone's got bigger and better subway stories. At the same time, it's like the subway is a great equalizer. Everyone gets on, but no one gets to their destination any faster."

Click on link to see photos: http://www.brooklyndowntownstar.com/StoryDisplay.asp?PID=4&NewsStoryID=4499

September 13, 2006

Good Housekeeping

The Book Babes' Guide to Our Favorite Cities...

New York: The Subway Chronicles: Scenes from Life in New York, edited by Jacquelin Cangro. The best way to people-watch in the Big Apple is on the subway. With these essays on the city's underground by some of New York's best writers, including Jonathan Lethem, Francine Prose and Colson Whitehead, you don't even have to wait for the next train. Our favorite is from humorist Calvin Trillin, who describes a dilemma faced by his neighbors who love to kvetch about everything: "Our subway stop was being made beautiful, and we hadn't figured out how to complain about it." http://magazines.ivillage.com/goodhousekeeping/view/babes/spc/0,,284607_701459,00.html

September 10, 2006

Los Angeles Times

Notes from Underground - The Subway Chronicles: Scenes from Life in New York

By Matthew Price
Matthew Price is a journalist and critic who lives along the N line in outer Brooklyn.

THE New York subway isn't just a way of getting around. It's a way of life, a universe, a vast, grimy town square on screeching steel wheels that will take you just about anywhere you need to go.

Stuff happens down there in the tunnels, on the platforms — which swelter in the summer and freeze in the winter — and, of course, on the trains. On any given day, you may meet the love of your life, be serenaded by an a cappella group — I've heard a heck of a lot of good music riding the rails — or be exhorted to make Jesus Christ your lord and savior. In Times Square station, the subway's busiest, the Scientologists will be happy to give you a stress test. The people-watching can't be beat and neither can the freak show — just the other day I saw a guy sporting a pair of fangs.

Then there's the unpleasant stuff: homelessness, suicide, pretty-good-sized rats and the ever-present fear of a cyanide gas attack, which, we're told, is due any time now.

I've often wondered if anyone is getting all this down. A couple of the tabloids used to have subway columnists but no longer. Back in 2002, New York writer Jacquelin Cangro had the good idea to found www.thesubwaychronicles.com, which bills itself as "a place for insightful, creative writing about the New York City subway system."

Now, Cangro has selected a clutch of pieces first published on her site, plus snippets of writing by such notables as Jonathan Lethem (who writes pungently about the wonderfully named Hoyt-Schermerhorn station in his old Brooklyn neighborhood), Colson Whitehead and Calvin Trillin for this anthology of subway writing.

"I bet you will find common threads of love, fear, anger, worry, exhilaration and comradeship among these essays," writes Cangro, and that's true enough. But in book form, "The Subway Chronicles" is a curiously mixed bag. Some of the pieces have a tepid, freshman-comp blandness to them; others are full of distracting navel gazing. Overall, there's just not enough attitude — after all, these are New Yorkers writing on a great New York institution, so you expect more oomph. But this collection will give you a taste of what life is like underground.

Crime writer Lawrence Block and transit historian Stan Fischler, both veteran New Yorkers, provide the best overviews of the subway's place in the city's life. Fischler, a consummate subway maven who pretty much knows every twist on every track in the system, writes lovingly of growing up in Brooklyn and taking the subway to Coney Island and Dodgers games. Sure, it's a bit nostalgic, but few other writers have evoked how intertwined the subway is with growing up in the city, how you come to know the city by the subway. Still, Block, who digs the vibe underground, writes: "Almost every other system, in this country or abroad, is more modern, more efficient, and more comfortable than ours."

But the subway, like New York itself, has seen far worse days, as Yona Zeldis McDonough remembers in "Under the Skin," about the thrill of being allowed to take the subway alone as a girl in the early '70s, when the system was a mess, and how one trip took an ugly, racially charged turn after a run-in with a girl gang.

The system — and the city — have taken enormous strides since then, but, even now, there is squalor and stench. Jennifer Toth, who in 1993 wrote what has become a cult classic, "The Mole People: Life in the Tunnels Beneath New York City" (which grew out of a piece she wrote while at the L.A. Times), still can't shake her harrowing forays into these zones of human wretchedness: They were "a frightening introduction to the real world in all its baseness and hope." The subway can be a cruel tutor.

It's not all grim, however; there is plenty of room for offbeat fun in "The Subway Chronicles." The novelist and book editor David Ebershoff is hilariously stonewalled when he tries to interview a group of subway cleaners: " 'What's the worst station to clean?'…. In chorus: 'All of 'em' " 'What's the worst borough to clean?' 'All of 'em.' " And Robert Lanham, author of "The Hipster Handbook," has a nutty time stalking his double, who "resembled some weird amalgamation of Jon Voight, circa 'Midnight Cowboy,' and the guy with the unfortunate bangs from 'Logan's Run,' " in his piece, "Straphanger Doppelgänger." I haven't yet seen mine.

There is one absolute gem in this collection, a piece that just nails the crazy energy that can be unleashed when a group of strangers are thrown together by sheer chance. From its over-the-top title ("Porno Man and I Versus the Feminist Avenger and Displaced Anger Man") to its smart-alecky wit and deadpan rhythms ("The train rolled in and I sat down next to two not-unattractive hipster girls who were chatting about something boring"), Daniels Parseliti's sketch of inadvertently starting a punch-up after a homeless man flashes a girly mag is hilarious. What ensues is a pure New York subway moment, off-kilter and a little crazy, that has Parseliti furiously parsing the meanings of "do the right thing." This is great stuff. Now, I gotta go catch a train. •

If you want other stories on this topic, search the Archives at latimes.com/archives.

September 4, 2006

The Globe and Mail: Canada's National Newspaper

Knife Fights and Fond Memories

by Simon Houpt

One morning about five years ago, Jacquelin Cangro was coming into Manhattan from Brooklyn on the F train when a man wandered into the subway car, apparently hoping to show off a fresh knife
wound to his abdomen. “He’d had probably a rough evening,” she mused last week. “He was seeking some assistance from fellow commuters, which we were unsure if we were going to provide, because he seemed not altogether sane.”

Living in New York can make you blasé about such stories. A friend once told me about the time she watched two men start lunging at each other with knives on the 3 train: When the doors opened at the next station, her fellow riders merely pushed the combatants off the car and then went back to chatting, reading, or listening to their iPods.

So after Cangro and her friends spent a jovial Thanksgiving dinner trying to top each other with particularly jarring mass transit anecdotes, she started up a website to attract stories. The Subway Chronicles, a collection of essays, poetry, and diary musings (at thesubwaychronicles.com) pulls in thousands of readers from around the world and has now spawned an anthology of the same name.

Twenty-seven writers submitted essays for the paperback volume, which arrived in stores last week, including Jonathan Lethem, Colson Whitehead, Calvin Trillin, Francine Prose and Lawrence
Block.

The calibre of names on display in part reflects the central cultural role played by the subway here, and not just because of movies like Death Wish and fiction like Saul Bellow’sMr. Sammler’s Planet. Even as New York becomes increasingly divided by economic disparities, the subway remains as democratic as ever: Everyone from Mayor Bloomberg to homeless people ride the rails. (I’ve spotted Laura Linney, Holly Hunter and Frances McDormandon the train.) Two weeks ago, when a couple of guys spent 24 hours traversing the entire NYC subway system, nourished only by beef jerky and water, the entire city seemed to rally behind them.

Prose gets at the notion that taking the subway is what makes people into New Yorkers. “To ride the subway every day is to be reminded on a daily basis what animals we are, what we have in common with those species with whom we share parallel rungs on the evolutionary ladder,” she
writes. “We operate on instinct; we learn better than to make the eye contact that might violate some unspoken code, and so use our antennae, our radar finely attuned to the slightest disturbance in the field: something out of place, something unusual, someone standing too close or looking at us just a little too long.

“Growing up in New York, you grow up with that radar; it’s not anything you have to learn or develop. It’s just there.”

Tim McLoughlin kicks off the collection with a world-weary memoir of his stretch as a night
watchman with the MTA (Metropolitan Transit Authority), paying tribute to the roughnecks who
keep the system going despite knuckleheaded intrusions by management. Subway historian Stan
Fischler weighs in with wistful remembrances of travelling with his father to Coney Island and the
city’s various ballparks, most of which are no longer standing. Lethem contributes Speak, Hoyt-
Shermerhorn, a tribute to the very first station he remembers entering as a child, holding his mother’s hand, on a trip to her office in Manhattan from his home in Brooklyn. Yona Zeldis McDonough writes of being reduced to tears on a subway platform by a pair of bullying
girls. Boris Fishman, who emigrated from Russia in 1988, compares the magnificent Moscow
metro with the more prosaic system of his adopted home. Amy Holman weaves in childhood remembrances of Jodie Foster movies while waiting for a train on a slow Sunday.

“There’s no better place to find inspiration as a writer,” says Cangro. “There’s something to be said about communicating with your fellow man, rather than hopping in your insulated vehicle and never communicating with another soul until you reach your destination.”

Of course, most riders still try to avoid communicating with their fellow man, which is one of the
main themes that emerges from the anthology. Even if it is no longer “marinating in a stew of subterranean criminality,” as Johnny Temple remembers it in 1991, the system remains an unpredictable and sometimes wild animal. Fear may not be at centre stage, but it hovers at the margins in this collection. (And sometimes not at the margins: Ken Wheaton’s essay is titled
Bombs! Anthrax! Gas! Ho, Hum.) For the subway carries both menace and promise: of inspiration,
of integration, of felicitous accidents. Prose gets at the dual nature as she recalls being a 19-year old in the summer of 1966, the same year that the serial killer Richard Speck murdered eight nursing students during one horrific night in Chicago. Prose couldn’t get the crime out of her head, and every time she walked the labyrinthine tunnels of Times Square subway station from one train to another, on the way back from writing class at Columbia, she was sure something awful lay in wait.

That summer, a scuzzy little man grabbed Prose’s breast as she walked through an otherwise deserted passageway beneath the bowels of Times Square.

Shaken, she threw away the inconsequential romance story she was working on and somehow found the ability to write instead about the assault. She says now that, in a minor but important way, the subway put her on the path to being a writer.

September 1, 2006

Library Journal

The Subway Chronicles: Cangro founded TheSubwayChronicles.com in 2002, and the site is still thriving, providing a place for New Yorkers to vent or rhapsodize about their public transit system. Inspired by the site, this anthology collects diverse essays from writers like Jonathan Lethem and Francine Prose, essays sharing little other than their basic topic and an obvious deep feeling for New York. Included are in-depth reminiscences about the subway of yesteryear and a comparison between the subway systems of New York and Moscow. Explorations of personal motivations for riding, long-term love/hate affairs with the subway and with New York in general, conversations with transit workers, and of course, ruminations on the quirks and personal hygiene habits of other riders all appear within these pages. Cangro has amassed a fascinating collection of perspectives, with a few commercially bolstering authors among the bunch. With any luck, the inclusion of such authors as Lethem and Colson Whitehead will push this title into the light; a recommended purchase for academic and larger public libraries alike. [Cangro is currently at work on her first novel.-Ed.]-Audrey Snowden, Cleveland P.L. Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

August 28, 2006

Metro New York

Subway Reading: .Although we would like to think our paper is the only thing you read on the morning commute, it would be pretty meta of you to instead pick up "The Subway Chronicles: Scenes From Life in New York." Editor Jacquelin Cangro and more will read from their book Thursday at 6:30 p.m. at Coliseum Books, 11 West 42nd Street, across from Bryant Park.

August 25, 2006

Daily Candy

Last Resort: Everyone’s already skipped town and left you in charge of apt/pet/plant/mistress sitting? Well, at least you can still let your mind wander. Crack open a copy of The Subway Chronicles, a new series of mass transit-inspired essays from straphangers like Jonathan Lethem, Colson Whitehead, and Calvin Trillin (coming out on Tuesday on amazon.com).

July 17, 2006

Publisher's Weekly

The Subway Chronicles:
Scenes from Life in New York
EDITED BY JACQUELIN CANGRO. Plume,
$14 paper (224p) ISBN 0-452-28779-0

Here is a delightful collection of New York stories by veteran straphangers—both known and unknown—dedicated to that amazing underground network. Along with expected accounts of the unsavory run-ins with weirdoes and stink bombs during the usual subway commute (e.g., Daniels Parseliti’s “Porno Man and I Versus the Feminist Avenger and Displaced Anger Man”), many of these authors offer poignant memories of riding the trains over the years, such as Jonathan Lethem’s account of haunting the eponymous station in “Speak, Hoyt-Schermerhorn” as a white, liberal-middle-class kid immersed in a fringe area of crime and poverty. “Parnassus Underground” by Patrick Flynn recalls joyfully the meaty reading the author was able to accomplish during long workday commutes from the Bronx, before he moved and (to his literary despair) shortened his travel time. Robert Lanham’s “Straphanger Doppelgänger” records the chilling encounter between two commuters of uncanny resemblance who have observed each other over a long
period. Most gratifying are the historical details worked into many of the essays, such as the comparison between Russian and New York underground railroads as noted by Boris Fishman in “Metro Blues, or How I Came to America.” This is a clever collection gathered by Cangro from her Web site, thesubwaychronicles.com. (Sept.)