Stand-In

West 113th St.

"New York is the stand-in, the ersatz of all the things I can remember and cannot have, and may not even want, much less love, but continue to look for."
André Aciman, False Papers

Surrogate City

Surrogate's Court

"New York is my home precisely because it is a place from which I can begin to be elsewhere—an analogue city, a surrogate city, a shadow city that allows me to naturalize and neutralize this terrifying, devastating, unlivable megalopolis by letting me think it is something else, somewhere else, that it is indeed far smaller, quainter than I feared."
André Aciman, False Papers