Up in the Old Hotel

This is a book about New York as it was a long time ago… Mitchell is interested in the texture of the city. He loves the cops and bums and old Italian restaurants. After a while you really feel engrained in the place yourself – William Leith * Evening Standard *
Swift, razor-sharp characterisation, narrative suspense and the sparest, yet most penetrating description * Evening Standard *
One of the greatest journalists America has produced * Times Literary Supplement *
What James Joyce might have written had he gone into journalism * Newsweek *
A poet of the waterfront and a writer of surpassing tales that captured the unsung and unconventional life of New York and its denizens * Independent *
If Borges had been a New Yorker he might have come up with something like Joe Gould’s Secret – Martin Amis
Remarkable – John Fowles
An original… Civilised, intelligent, kind, humorous – Doris Lessing
[Mitchell’s] portrait of old New York is unmatchable * Big Issue *
It is a teeming confection of the kind of people you wish to meet in a city, but would never quite have the guts to spend time with * Stuart Ever’s blog *

Joseph Mitchell was born near Iona, North Carolina, in 1908. He came to New York City in 1929 at the age of twenty-one and began his career as an apprentice crime reporter for The World. He also worked as a reporter and features writer at The Herald Tribune and The World-Telegram before joining The New Yorker in 1938.

Mitchell’s final published work, “Joe Gould’s Secret,” appeared in The New Yorker on September 26, 1964. He continued to go to his office at The New Yorker almost every day for the next thirty-one years and six months, but he submitted no further writing.

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