Book Description

Clifford Browder’s Wicked City is a collection of short fiction featuring a wide range of people surviving, and trying to fully realize themselves, in turbulent nineteenth-century New York. Among them are:

• An ambitious young man given the rare opportunity to marry his boss’s daughter and advance in the firm, the only drawback being his secret preference for brief sexual encounters with men;
• A cartman hired to transport the anatomical collection of a respected professor of surgery, including a corpse in embalming fluid that, if discovered by the public, might well cause a riot;
• A young Chinaman who witnesses the murder of a compatriot and must decide how to survive and thrive among these savage round-faced barbarians;
• A woman so unnerved by the sinister growth of her garden that she asks her pastor to perform a full-blown exorcism;
• A ragpicker trudging the streets in a snowstorm who fights off drowsiness and fatigue with grandiose fantasies, bitter memories, and a desperate plea to her deceased mother for healing;
• A buckskinned Westerner with a Sioux arrow through his hat who dazzles the city with his stories of grizzlies and buffalo hunts and wild women, while limping sometimes with one leg and sometimes with the other.

Whatever their hopes and fears, Browder’s characters cannot live without New York. They bear witness to the city’s wild diversity, its intensity, its creativity. They are New York. Getting to know them, readers will better understand this astonishing metropolis, unique yesterday and unique today, the most exciting city in the world.