The afterword explores how the essays in this collection elucidate the relationship of New York to the literary written page. They describe a complex range of subjects and interrogate the relationship between the printed page and life in one of the greatest cities on earth by looking at genre, characters, ethnicity, race, locality, and much more. This is a complicated city, with dozens of foreign languages spoken and read daily, and people of seemingly clashing cultures living side by side in peace. For a long time, New York dominated the American publishing scene, and was headquarters for scores of successful book publishers, hundreds of widely#x2013;circulated magazines and newspapers, and thousands of poetry and prose books, reinforcing its place as the commercial and literary capital of the nation. The fiction that locals wrote, and the fiction that locals read, defined the way New Yorkers thought about that complexity of life in the port city.