BOOK REVIEW: Cătălina Neculai, URBAN SPACE AND LATE TWENTIETH-CENTURY NEW YORK LITERATURE. REFORMED GEOGRAPHIES, New York: Palgrave, Macmillan

Very much like a number of New York writers, who, back in the 1970s and 1980s, dared to tread where the sociologist, the urban geographer, or the documenter treads by professional default, and to engage head-on with the hard city of socioeconomic networks (p. 60), Catalina Neculai, through her seminal book, trespasses new territories for the philologist who she is, and in the process, she manages to make a powerful statement—namely, that written culture, just like visual arts, can telescope urban change. One must only know how to read the signs