As New York City recovers from the impacts of COVID-19, there’s much to learn about the ways in which the city responded to the social shifts wrought by the pandemic.

OHNY Board Member Saundra Thomas moderated a conversation with author Jeremiah Moss about his book Feral CIty and how New Yorkers found liberation in lockdown.

Feral City (W.W. Norton & Company, October 2022) takes readers on a journey through lockdown New York, exploring the city’s public spaces after the departure of half a million New Yorkers. Jeremiah Moss, author of Vanishing New York (Dey Street Books, July 2018), in corporates his new sense of space as a transgender man, along with insights from psychoanalysis, and queer theory, to examine how the absence of New York’s dominant class created a more vibrant city.

In this book talk with Moss, reflect on how New Yorkers typically pushed to the margins were able to participate in an “historic explosion of activism, resistance, and spontaneity” as the repressive forces of the normal social order were suspended by the pandemic. Through these stories, readers gain insight into both the way public space and the spaces inside us are controlled and how they can be set free.

Purchase Feral City here.

Author Bio

Jeremiah Moss is the acclaimed author of Vanishing New York. Winner of a Pushcart Prize, his writing has appeared in n+1, the New York Times, The New Yorker, and the Paris Review, among others. Moss is the pen name of Griffin Hansbury, who works as a psychoanalyst in Manhattan.

OHNY Stacks

OHNY Stacks is a series of book talks exploring the unknown, the unseen, and the unnoticed. Join us on Thursday evenings with authors of highly acclaimed books critical to understanding the past, present, and future of New York—as well as national trends or global issues that influence the shape, structure, and experience of cities and urban life today.