TWO YEARS IN NEW YORK

Before, During and After COVID

Two Years in New York: Before, During and After Covid is the “fictional memoir” of a young man—Michael Mohr—from California (an ambitious writer in his mid-thirties) who, after a breakup, flees the Bay Area for Manhattan to chase the elusive authorial ghost, as it were, of Kerouac, Updike, Mailer, Sontag, Didion and all the other famous 20th century writers who lived in Manhattan, the mecca of the writers’ world. In 2019 he makes the move. But what he cannot foresee—what no one can—is the explosion of Covid-19, the BLM riots, the political polarization of the country, the madness of Trump and the questioning of institutions. Living in a rough part of East Harlem, Michael was lucky to get out alive. Told in stellar first-person prose, hewing to the autobiographical memoir style of authors such as Nabokov and Henry Miller, Two Years in New York covers 2.3 years of a pandemic, a dazzling, complex relationship between Michael and a talented painter, the clash between Michael’s imaginative expectations of The Big Apple and the way it actually is, and the romantic reality of finally being in New York.