Introduction by John Freeman
Due North / Garnette Cadogan
Options / Dinaw Mengestu
Every night a little death / Patrick Ryan
Miss Adele amidst the corsets / Zadie Smith
Near the edge of darkness / Colum McCann
The children suicides / Maria Venegas
Partially vacated / DW Gibson
Four more years / Jonathan Dee
So where are we? / Lawrence Joseph
Round trip / Skhil Dharma
Aliens of extraordinary ability / Taiye Selasi
The baffled courtier: Lorenzo da Ponte in America / Edmund White
Quid pro quo, just as easy as that / Jeanne Thornton
Introduction / Dave Eggers
Park slope livin' / Chaasadahyah Jackson
One, maybe two minutes from fire / Téa Obreht
Service/nonservice: how bartenders see New Yorkers / Rosie Schaap
A block divided against itself / Sarah Jaffe
Starting out / Junot Díaz
Engine / Bill Cheng
The sixth borough / Jonathan Safran Foer
Mixed media, dimensions variable / Michael Salu
First Avenue & Second Street / Hannah Tinti
Zapata Boulevard / Valeria Luiselli
Home / Tim Freeman
Introduction. Small fates 1912 / Teju Cole
Small fates 1912 / Teju Cole
Seeking / Victor Lavalle
If the 1 percent stifles New York's creative talent, I'm out of here / David Byrne
Traveling from Brooklyn / Lydia Davis
Walt Whitman on Further Lane / Mark Doty

"Thirty major contemporary writers examine life in a deeply divided New York In a city where the top one percent earns more than a half-million dollars per year while twenty-five thousand children are homeless, public discourse about our entrenched and worsening wealth gap has never been more sorely needed. This remarkable anthology is the literary world's response, with leading lights including Zadie Smith, Junot Diaz, and Lydia Davis bearing witness to the experience of ordinary New Yorkers in extraordinarily unequal circumstances. Through fiction and reportage, these writers convey the indignities and heartbreak, the callousness and solidarities, of living side by side with people of starkly different means. They shed light on the subterranean lives of homeless people who must find a bed in the city's tunnels; the stresses that gentrification can bring to neighbors in a Brooklyn apartment block; the shenanigans of seriously alienated night-shift paralegals; the trials of a housing defendant standing up for tenants' rights; and the humanity that survives in the midst of a deeply divided city. Tales of Two Cities is a brilliant, moving, and ultimately galvanizing clarion call for a city--and a nation--in crisis."--Publisher description