El fondo del puerto

Long before Tom Wolfe and company invented the concept of "New Journalism", Joseph Mitchell was already practicing something very similar in his now legendary articles for The New Yorker. Of the various books in which they were compiled, this has always been considered the best and most representative of the Mitchell style. It brings together six pieces written in the 1940s and 1950s. They are independent texts but linked to each other, because in all of them the author wanders along the New York seafront and explores a city far removed from the tourist postcards. Mitchell describes the port areas, the Hudson River and the East River, the fish market, the now-defunct oyster farming facilities, an old cemetery on Staten Island, barges, barges, fishing boats and unique characters such as Sloppy Louie, the owner of a restaurant. A portrait of the belly of the city and also of a world that is disappearing, of stories of the present and legends of the past, of eccentric types, The Bottom of the Pier is a prodigious chronicle of New York and its inhabitants: first-rate journalism and great literature.