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Pick up your copy of
The Subway Chronicles
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The
Subway Chronicles is available at
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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!
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table of contents.
Inside...
The day we saw the Pus Man and his brother was
the day I briefly considered using other modes
of transportation around New York City.
Judging from their accents, the two backpacking
tourists were from the deep south. They were
loud, large, fat and sweaty, wearing
bottle-thick horn-rimmed glasses and undersized
gimme hats. They were humping several pounds of
what appeared to be filthy laundry and old junk
food containers in their cammo backpacks. They
also were seriously mentally impaired, though I
could not determine if this was a chemically or
genetically induced condition.
Needless to say, everyone in our subway car
tensed when they boarded.
[More]
No one has ever asked me to dance. Through all the middle school
dances and the high school prom, no boy, guy or man has ever suggested a
slow dance with me to whatever cheesy song the DJ was playing. My
then-boyfriend and I danced at my sister’s wedding, but dancing with
one’s girlfriend is in the boyfriend contract, which negates the
unexpected thrill of, would you like to dance, of course I’ll dance, I’m
your damn girlfriend, if we don’t dance rumors will spread.
There is a cellist playing in the subway tunnel between the shuttle and
the trains as I walked to the 1 with Ian. We hold hands as though
we are lovers, and as the evocative music filled the compressed space
with an overwhelming but nameless emotion, a sensation rises in my
throat and chest, threatening to burst through my skin and rise to meet
the sound. [More]
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Classic Featured Essay
Sleeper Car
by Michael Kearney
I was mugged three times on the subway. I wonder if that's a record. Three times, to one guy, in one summer? Nah, it's very hard to set records in this town. There's probably some guy walking around out there who's got six or seven under his belt. Maybe someone picked up four over a long weekend. Still, I'm proud of my three. They make up my New York City Scary Survival Story, a story which I'll admit I've used shamelessly to impress impressionable sub urbanites who think the subway is a festering, lawless, criminal underworld and who wouldn't go down there for anything less than love or money. It's a story however whose details change with each telling, simply because there were very few details to work with in the first place. I've had to invent the gunpoint, and the eight-inch blade, and the five of them, and the grappling, and the struggling, and all that kind of stuff. For effect you know. What can I say? It's bullshitic license.
I blame my girlfriend for the muggings. Well, my ex-girlfriend that is, for this was five years ago, and we've both moved on since. I lived in the Bronx then and she lived in Queens, and together we socialized on Houston and Bleeker and Lafayette, and a bunch of other places south of 14th Street and north of Chinatown. We were both drinkers at the time, and after drinking in the city bars, we'd head back to Queens and have one or two more in The Copper Jug before walking the nine blocks to her place. You'd think that nine blocks wouldn't give a couple much of a chance to get into a heated argument, but we seemed to manage it, and on a fairly consistent basis, too. She had a way of driving me nuts like nobody else. At the best of times, we couldn't agree. Any situation was ripe for our radically different interpretations. We once had a row over Cadbury's chocolate, for God's sake.
[More]
See more featured
essays here.
links
NYC Transit
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www.straphangers.org
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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. So if you want
to check out the best reality show around, stay a while
and see what's going on underground.
Contact us: submissions [at] thesubwaychronicles
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