Night Walk

Twenty-five years after the printing of his seminal 1988 book, Invisible City, Ken Schles revisits his archive and fashions a narrative of lost youth: a delirious, peripatetic walk in the evening air of an irretrievable Downtown New York as he saw and experienced it. Night Walk is a substantive and intimate chronicle of New York's last pre-Internet bohemian outpost, a stream of consciousness portrayal that peels back layers of petulance and squalor to find the frisson and striving of a life lived amongst the rubble. Here, Schles embodies the flâneur as Sontag defines it, as a "connoisseur of empathy," "cruising the urban inferno, the voyeuristic stroller who discovers the city as a landscape of voluptuous extremes." We see in Night Walk a new and revelatory Ulysses for the 21st century: a searching tale of wonder and desire, life and love in the dying hulk of a ruined American city. I lay these fragments before you. What has since been rebuilt now reverts back to its former state of skeletal ruin. The dead reappear, hurry about and whisper their siren songs into your ear. -- Ken Schles from the introduction of Night Walk. Ken Schles Night Walk Texts by Ken Schles, T.S. Eliot Book design by Ken Schles Published by Steidl 162 pages 9.1 x 6.8 in. / 23,2 x 17,3 cm 107 photographs Quadratone Clothbound hardcover with dust jacket €38.00 / £30.00 / US$45.00 ISBN 978-3-86930-692-6