Ken Schles: Night Walk

Twenty-five years after his seminal 1988 book, Invisible City, Ken Schles revisits his archive and fashions a narrative of lost youth: a delirious, peripatetic walk in the evening air of an irretrievable Downtown New York as he saw and experienced it. Night Walk is a substantive and intimate chronicle of New York’s last pre-Internet bohemian outpost, a stream-of-consciousness portrayal that peels back layers of petulance and squalor to expose the frisson and striving of a life lived amongst the rubble. Here Schles embodies the flâneur as Susan Sontag defines it, as a “connoisseur of empathy … cruising the urban inferno, the voyeuristic stroller who discovers the city as a landscape of voluptuous extremes.” We see in Night Walk a new and revelatory Ulysses for the twenty-first century: a searching tale of wonder and desire, life and love in the dying hulk of a ruined American city.