A place for insightful, creative writing
about the New York City subway system

 
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Pick up your copy of

The Subway Chronicles

today!

The Subway Chronicles is available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble or your favorite local retailer

The book contains 27 essays from some of your favorite straphangers like Jonathan Lethem, Francine Prose, Calvin Trillin and Lawrence Block, and some of the writers you've discovered on this site, such as Anastasia Ashman, Megan Lyles and Ken Wheaton. Read more!

Visit The Subway Chronicles on My Space!

Read the editor's BLOG!

 

Click here for more information about the book or to view the table of contents.

 

What's neW

Markus Hartel . http://www.markushartel.com
New York black and white street photography



Inside...

  • Danielle Winston realizes that once you make eye contact on the subway, you can never go back.

  • What is your favorite line? Paula Damiano pays homage to the 1 train.

 

About Us

Founded in March 2002, The Subway Chronicles is a journal written by commuters - the people who ride the New York City subway every day.

We publish essays, creative nonfiction and subway diaries each month, and we're always looking for new material. Click here to read our submission guidelines.

So if you want to check out the best reality show around, stay a while and see what's going on underground. Fear Factor has nothing on us.

Contact us with questions, ideas or to send your essay.

submissions  [at]  thesubwaychronicles  [dot]  com

links

NYC Transit

  • NYPIRG Straphangers Campaign is a great place to start for information about public transportation in NYC. www.straphangers.org
  • Join our friend network at on My Space at myspace.com/thesubwaychronicles.

Transit Around the Globe

Book Excerpt

from "Tunnel Stories," by Jennifer Toth    

   Almost fifteen years have passed since I wrote my final chapter [in The Mole People]. New York's underground still follows me. In Marrakech and Berlin, London and Paris, almost without realizing it, I look for people in the dark hollows of tunnels and subways. Whatever city or country, it is the same search. Cupping my hands to the darkened windows at the ends of subway cars, peering down grates, I look for evidence of life. Sometimes I see people wandering the tracks or camped at their sides, and I imagine their stories from the way they walk or sit or stand. Abused child, runaway teen, disturbed war veteran, drug addict, alcoholic, mentally ill, depressed, bipolar, schizophrenic.

     Today I think of a man who has amnesia. From a car accident, he thinks. When he woke from a coma, he had several grown children, a few grandchildren, and a kind wife of thirty-five years. He could not recognize them. He could remember complicated math equations. He knew how to read. He recited long poems to me, and even longer passages from books I only later read. But he could not remember his family. This did not bother him much at first, but it troubled his family greatly. His personality had changed.

     "They didn't want to know me as I am now. Every day they mourned for someone I didn't know and couldn't care less about," he said.

     He had to leave, he said. He had to disappear from the life he had left when his head hit the windshield. He was free now, he claimed, though sometimes he missed his soft bed, a full fridge, and the warmth of a body next to him. But at least he was free of pain, he told me.

        Find The Subway Chronicles at your favorite retailer.

 

Online Essay Of The Month

July 2008

A Matter of Life and Death

by Montana Whiteley

     

It's 11 a.m. on Tuesday and my normally reliable downtown 1 train – reliable being a relative term – is late, very late. I step into the first car of the train, as always. This was, at first, because I could usually get a seat and it would let me off close to the exit at my 50th Street stop, but now because it has become almost a pathology for me, to where I will actually miss trains if I can't get to the first car quickly enough. Today it is packed, wall-to-wall, and I immediately regret my decision to layer a thick hoodie under my pea coat in case of rain (Hoods, always hoods.  I refuse to contribute to nightmare-ish problem of umbrellas in this city.  The fact that I have both of my eyes after a good rain never ceases to amaze me.)

     The train begins moving at half the normal speed and the commute is already excruciating.  I only have five stops to go between 86th Street and 50th Street, but I'm sweating profusely and jockeying for arm space between two tall men in heavy jackets.  At a slow crawl we make it past 79th… 72nd… 66th…59th… picking up hoards at every stop. Why doesn't anyone get off? I wonder, slamming my bag into the lady's face in front of me as my left earphone falls out and I struggle to replace it. Someone has to go to these places. They have to. Carefully timed to my absolute breaking point, we finally begin the nine block trek from 59th to 50th, and pick up speed at that, when the train comes to a total, sudden, dare I say, screeching halt. No.  No.  Why?  We're so close. I can smell the Times Square tourists. Come on train, come on. Slowly the train moves again, and I breathe a sigh of relief. Inch by inch, the first two cars creep into the station and agonizingly, the train stops again. A minute goes by…then two…then five…the people outside stare in at us and we stare out at them, imprisoned. Desperation begins to kick in. [More...]

See more featured essays here.

 

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