As New York City's largest borough, Brooklyn is rich in history, diversity, and texture. Of all the places that ring with the echoes of America's immigrant experience, perhaps none has penetrated deeper into the nation's imagination than Brooklyn. Since its settlement by the Dutch, it has been home to a constantly changing population, with nearly one hundred different ethnic groups today.

While Brooklyn may be a way station for new immigrants, it is also home to many others who seek refuge from Manhattan - the other side of bridge.

This distinct ambience of Brookly has inspired and nurtured many native writers it has also made a profound impact on those passing through. The Brooklyn Reader draws upon a wealth of genres - short stories poetry, essays, novels, biographies, and plays - in offering thirty writers unique experiences of the borough.

Memories of childhoods there from Ernest Poole, Betty Smith, Pete Hamill, and Woody Allen mix with accounts of adjustment to life in America from Shirley Chisholm and Cristina Garcia, and intertwine with delightful tales of discovery from Truman Capote, James Agee, and William Styron in this anthology.

The Brooklyn they evoke from Coney Island to the Heights, from the 1850s to the present, is a place of mingling cultures, of lives that are lived with uncommon intensity of music and aromas and impressions that live in the memory of all the senses.