-
[A] stylish memoir...Gopnik is such a celebrated fixture at the New Yorker you might forget he first had to get to New York. He and his spouse got there in the 1980s....[At the Strangers' Gate] depicts the New York City of those days, the people they met, the rat-infested lofts they lived in.–The Philadelphia Inquirer
-
-
Adam Gopnik is a flâneur, a voyeur of streetscapes, crowds and singular personalities...He infers, he observes—and then he composes. Because above all else, Gopnik is a writer.
- Eve Zibart, BookPage
-
Gopnik’s memoir of life in New York over the past 30 years is everything we enjoy about his writing. It’s at once intellectual, casual, observant and thoughtful.
- San Francisco Chronicle
-
A tale of love, New York in the '80s and very small studio apartments...Gopnik has a way of making daily domestic life both fascinating and moving, as with previous books Paris to the Moon andThrough the Children's Gate, and his latest is no exception.–The New York Post, "15 books you won't be able to put down this Fall"
-
-
A riveting and incandescent chronicle of personal evolution vividly set within the ever-morphing, cocaine-stoked crucible of ferocious ambition that was 1980s Manhattan. [Gopnik] tells tales of the forging of a marriage; of nightmares apartment battles with verminous hordes; of fortuitous jobs at museums, men’s fashion magazines, and a book publisher; and of bonds developed with critic Robert Hughes, artist Jeff Koons, and, most profoundly, photographer Richard Avedon. Arabesque, captivating, self-deprecating, and affecting, Gopnik’s cultural and intimate reflections, in league with those of Alfred Kazin and Joan Didion, are rich in surprising moments and delving perceptions into chance, creativity, character, style, conviction, hard work, and love.
- Booklist (starred review)
-
“As Gopnik writes, ‘art traps time,’ and with humor, affection, and the careful eye of a trained art historian, he offers an enjoyable and engaging story of New York at a very specific moment in history.”
- Library Journal (starred review)
-
“Gopnik moves masterfully between humorous, poignant minutiae of private experience and a macro view of New York City throughout the 1980s.”
- Publishers Weekly
-
“An affecting memoir…An engaging tale of a writer finding his way in work and life.”
- Kirkus Reviews