{ "item_title" : "Feral City", "item_author" : [" Jeremiah Moss "], "item_description" : "The pandemic lockdown of 2020 launched an unprecedented urban experiment. Traffic disappeared from the streets. Times Square fell silent. And half a million residents fled the most crowded city in America. In this innovative and thrilling book, author and social critic Jeremiah Moss, hailed as New York City's career elegist (New York Times), explores a city emptied of the dominant class--and their controlling influence. Plagues have a disinhibiting effect, Moss writes. As the normal order is suspended, the repressive force of civilization lifts and our rules fall away, shifting the boundaries of society and psyche.In public spaces made vibrant by New Yorkers left behind, Moss experienced an uncanny time warp. Biking through deserted Manhattan, he encountered the hustlers, eccentrics, and renegades who had been pressed into silence and invisibility by an oppressive, normative gentrification, now reemerging to reclaim the city. For one wild year the streets belonged to wandering nudists and wheelie bikers, mystical vagabonds and performance artists working to disrupt the status quo, passionate activists protesting for Black lives--along with the everyday New Yorkers who had been pushed to the margins for too long. Participating in a historic explosion of activism, resistance, and spontaneity, from queer BLM marches to exuberant outdoor dance parties, Moss discovered an intoxicating freedom. Without hyper-normal people to constrain it, New York became more creative, connected, humane, and joyful than it had been in years.Moss braids this captivating narrative with an account of his renewed sense of place as a transgender man, weaving together insights from psychoanalysis, literature, and queer theory. A kaleidoscopic vision of a city transformed, Feral City offers valuable insight into the way public space and the spaces inside us are controlled and can be set free.", "item_img_path" : "https://covers3.booksamillion.com/covers/bam/0/39/386/847/0393868478_b.jpg", "price_data" : { "retail_price" : "27.95", "online_price" : "27.95", "our_price" : "27.95", "club_price" : "27.95", "savings_pct" : "0", "savings_amt" : "0.00", "club_savings_pct" : "0", "club_savings_amt" : "0.00", "discount_pct" : "10", "store_price" : "" } }

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Since the early 1990s, Jeremiah Moss has lived in—and fiercely loved—New York City. In 2007, the poet and psychoanalyst launched the blog Jeremiah's Vanishing New York, which became the foundation for 2017's well-received Vanishing New York: How a Great City Lost Its Soul. In blog and book, Moss bemoaned the damaging outcomes of hypergentrification. Five years on, Moss is back in the fray with the passionate and probing Feral City: On Finding Liberation in Lockdown New York, in which he rails against the results of New York's tectonic shifts in population and personality during what he calls the "profound accidental experiment" of the COVID-19 lockdowns. Moss expertly and often hilariously indulges his inner curmudgeon when describing the recent influx of moneyed and inconsiderate "New People" and rhapsodizing about the city that emerged once they fled the virus' epicenter. Along the way, he considers what's left when the dominant class is skimmed off the top of a city. After all, the New People have other places to go, but what happens to those who have no other options—or a complete inability to imagine living anywhere else? As Moss walks and bicycles around the city every day, he joins protests and rallies and wee-hours dance parties in search of answers (while avoiding police intent on tamping down rebellion and revelry). He also reflects on his newfound feelings of confidence and freedom as a transgender man who reveled in the joyful queer energy that infused the streets of New York in its feral state. When officials began declaring that New York should "get back to normal," Moss felt sad that he (and the city as a whole) seemed to be reverting to pre-lockdown habits. Who and what, he wonders, is normal anyway? Who decides, and why? Is this newly rediscovered rebellious spirit gone for good? In Feral City, Moss has created an indelible portrait of a city in transition; it vibrates with eat-the-rich energy and time-marches-on poignancy. "One day," he writes, "the tide will shift and New York will change, as it always does. That, as people like to say, is the one thing you can count on in this town." Perhaps he'll be back to write about it when it does.