In the City — Hagfish

ISBN: 9781965028049
Trade paperback
266 pages

$18.00

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AVAILABLE MAY 2026

"A story of a young woman on the brink of becoming—sharp, cosmopolitan, and completely timeless. I hope Silber never goes out of print."
Marlowe Granados, author of Happy Hour

"In the City is a novel about the electric promise of a life fully lived, the education a city offers, and the chance-taking it demands in return. Moving through rooming houses and provisional lives, Pauline constructs an improvised existence among the city’s risks and riches. She falls in and out of love, tries on selves, and searches for belonging in a vast, exhilarating, and uncertain world. Guided by her own curiosity and nerve, she learns independence as best she can: by pushing forward, into beckoning possibility."
Sarah Blakley-Cartwright, author of Heavy Cream

Like all young people who move to Manhattan from elsewhere, Pauline sees her arrival in the city as an escape from the provincial entrapments of home. She seeks something more than her quiet life with her rough-mannered family in bucolic Newark, New Jersey: a frugal but free-wheeling existence among the artists, writers, and musicians flocking to the city in the 1920s, a life filled with books, impassioned conversation, and unencumbered sex.

Pauline falls in with an ostentatious group of friends who spend their nights in speakeasies and all-night cafes in Greenwich Village. There is Nita, an outspoken violinist who wants a rich husband; Rose, who lives in a hotel, waiting for her married lover to call; Peter, a painter with roving interests; and Walter, wealthy, older, and forever divorcing his wife. She becomes involved with a set of arrogant men: a self-proclaimed writer more interested in spending other people’s money than producing anything meaningful, and a handsome recluse unable to stomach her libertine lifestyle. Pauline’s effort to disentangle herself from these relationships and the elusive ideal of living young and free in the city forms a wry, finely-observed, and moving portrait of a woman’s self-making.

Originally published in 1987, In the City is a sharp, emotionally sophisticated portrait of a young woman trying to claim a life of her own in an indifferent world. With its nuance and quiet power, the novel reveals the clarity, wit, and emotional precision that have defined Joan Silber’s celebrated body of work ever since.

JOAN SILBER
Joan Silber is the author of ten books of fiction. Her first novel won the PEN/ Hemingway Award in 1981; she’s also received the National Book Critics Circle Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award. Her stories have appeared in The New Yorker and other magazines, and she’s received the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Short Story. She taught for many years at Sarah Lawrence College and in the Warren Wilson College MFA Program. She lives in Manhattan, on the Lower East Side, with her dog Jolie.

ADDITIONAL PRAISE FOR IN THE CITY:

"[In the City] is astonishingly wise, beautifully written, and evocative of so much: just how it felt to be on one's own in the city, waiting for life to begin."
Francine Prose, author of 1974: A Personal History

"This is a rare and lovely book . . . Pauline, who is unsophisticated, perhaps, but never an innocent, is the person we all remember being."
Robb Forman Dew, author of Being Polite to Hitler

"Fascinating . . . Silber's prose is a marvel of compression, precision, and tact, a perfect counterpoint to [her heroine's] inquisitive, bold, and self-absorbed sensibility."
The Philadelphia Inquirer

ADDITIONAL PRAISE FOR JOAN SILBER:
"Like Grace Paley and Lucia Berlin, [Silber is] a master of talking a story past its easiest meaning; like [Alice] Munro, a master of the compression and dilation of time, what time and nothing else can reveal to people about themselves. She has an American voice: silvery, within arm’s length of old cadences, but also limber, thieving, marked by occasional raids on slang and jargon, at ease both high and low, funny, tenderhearted, sharp. It gives her the rare ability to reach the deepest places in the plainest ways."
Charles Finch, The Washington Post

"Silber illuminates those invisible fissures and inexplicable distances that we sense, however dimly, make up our shared lives with others as much as our formal connections and open battles . . . I never wonder more at how little we know about how greatly we factor in other people’s lives than I do when reading Silber at her best."
Joshua Ferris, The New York Times

"Some writers wow us with verbal pyrotechnics and wildly outrageous scenarios. Others ply their trade more quietly—relying on subtle language and profound insight into human nature, making art of everyday lives. Joan Silber belongs to the latter category . . . Silber views her characters’ strivings with an empathetic tenderness. That authorial stance is reflected in the prose of Improvement, which is colloquial and knowing and seemingly effortless. There is not a wasted word in all of the novel’s 227 pages, which nevertheless contain multitudes."
Judges' citation, National Book Critics Circle Award