Old Mr. Flood by Joseph Mitchell
Old Mr. Flood by Joseph Mitchell Foreword by Charles McGrath (MacAdam Cage hardcover edition, April 2005) Shop Indie Bookstores A wise bookseller once taught me that right after reading something really, especially good, it's a good idea to read something completely different, as a sort of palate cleanser. After The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet and The Passage , I felt the need to read something that was definitively not a big fat novel of an unfamiliar world. Luckily, my hand trailing over the unread riches of my bookshelves landed on Old Mr. Flood . As a small collection of three short semi-nonfictional pieces about a downtown New Yorker, it was exactly what I had been wanting. For some inexcusable reason I had never read Joseph Mitchell before, though he's one of those authors you feel you know all about without reading him (the same way I thought, mistakenly, that I knew what Michaelangelo's David looked like before I saw the real thing). Apparently he is the...