110 Stories: New York Writes after September 11

by Art Spiegelman (Contributor), Ulrich Baer

New York is a city of writers. And when the city was attacked on 9/11, its writers began to do what writers do, they began to look and feel and think and write, began to struggle to process an event unimaginable before, and even after, it happened. The work of journalists appeared immediately, in news reports, commentaries, and personal essays. But no single collection has yet recorded how New York writers of fiction, poetry, and dramatic prose have responded to 9/11.

Now, in 110 Stories, Ulrich Baer has gathered a multi-hued range of voices that convey, with vivid immediacy and heightened imagination, the shock and loss suffered in September. From a stunning lineup of 110 renowned and emerging writers including Paul Auster, Lynne Sharon Schwartz, Edwidge Danticat, Vivian Gornick, Phillip Lopate, Dennis Nurkse, Melvin Bukiet, Susan Wheeler these stories give readers not so much an analysis of what happened as the very shape and texture of a city in crisis, what it felt like to be here, the external and internal damage that the city and its inhabitants absorbed in the space and the aftermath of a few unforgettable hours. As A.M. Homes says in one of the book's eyewitness accounts, "There is no place to put this experience, no folder in the mental hard drive that says, 'catastrophe.' It is not something that you want to remember, not something that you want to forget." This collection testifies to the power of poetry and storytelling to preserve and give meaning to what seems overwhelming. It showcases the literary imagination in its capacity to gauge the impact of 9/11 on how we view the world.

Just as the stories of the World Trade towers were filled with people from all walks of life, the stories collected here reflect New York's true diversity, its boundless complexity and polyglot energy, its regenerative imagination, and its spirit of solidarity and endurance.

The editor s proceeds will be donated to charity. Cover art donated by Art Spiegelman.

List of Contributors Humera Afridi, Ammiel Alcalay, Elena Alexander, Meena Alexander, Jeffery Renard Allen, Roberta Allen, Jonathan Ames, Darren Aronofsky, Paul Auster, Jennifer Belle, Jenifer Berman, Charles Bernstein, Star Black, Breyten Breytenbach, Melvin Jules Bukiet, Peter Carey, Lawrence Chua, Ira Cohen, Imraan Coovadia, Edwidge Danticat, Alice Elliot, Eric Darton, Lydia Davis, Samuel R. Delany, Maggie Dubris, Rinde Eckert, Janice Eidus, Masood Farivar, Carolyn Ferrell, Richard Foreman, Deborah Garrison, Amitav Ghosh, James Gibbons, Carol Gilligan, Thea Goodman, Vivian Gornick, Tim Griffin, Lev Grossman, John Guare, Sean Gullette, Jessica Hagedorn, Kimiko Hahn, Nathalie Handal, Carey Harrison, Joshua Henkin, Tony Hiss, David Hollander, A.M. Homes, Richard Howard, Laird Hunt, Siri Hustvedt, John Keene, John Kelly, Wayne Koestenbaum, Richard Kostelanetz, Guy Lesser, Jonathan Lethem, Jocelyn Lieu, Tan Lin, Sam Lipsyte, Phillip Lopate, Karen Malpede, Charles McNulty, Pablo Medina, Ellen Miller, Paul D. Miller/DJ Spooky, Mark Jay, Tova Mirvis, Albert Mobilio, Alex Molot, Mary Morris, Tracie Morris, Anna Moschovakis, Richard Eoin Nash, Josip Novakovich, Dennis Nurkse, Geoffrey O'Brien, Larry O'Connor, Robert Polito, Nelly Reifler, Rose-Myriam Rejouis, Roxana Robinson, Avital Ronell, Daniel Asa Rose, Joe Salvatore, Grace Schulman, Lynne Sharon Schwartz, Dani Shapiro, Akhil Sharma, Suzan Sherman, Jenefer Shute, Hal Sirowitz, Pamela Sneed, Chris Spain, Art Spiegelman, Catharine R. Stimpson, Liz Swados, Lynne Tillman, Mike Topp, David Trinidad, Val Vinokurov, Chuck Wachtel, Mac Wellman, Owen West, Rachel Wetzsteon, Susan Wheeler, Peter Wortsman, John Yau, Christopher Yu.

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Genres: Anthologies, Short Stories

344 pages, Paperback

First published August 4, 2004

About the author

Art Spiegelman is an American cartoonist, editor, and cultural innovator whose work has profoundly influenced the perception of comics as a legitimate art form, blending literary sophistication with experimental visual storytelling. Emerging from the underground comix movement of the 1960s and 1970s, Spiegelman quickly distinguished himself with a distinctive approach that combined meticulous craftsmanship, psychological insight, and narrative complexity, challenging conventions of sequential art and the boundaries between personal memoir and historical record. He co-founded the landmark anthology Raw with his wife, Françoise Mouly, which became a platform for cutting-edge, avant-garde cartoonists from around the world, blending surrealist imagery, literary experimentation, and bold visual ideas that redefined the possibilities of the medium. Spiegelman is best known for his groundbreaking graphic novel Maus, a haunting, deeply personal depiction of his father’s experiences as a Holocaust survivor, which used anthropomorphic characters to explore trauma, memory, and identity with unprecedented depth; the work earned a Special Pulitzer Prize and established Spiegelman as a central figure in both literary and visual culture. Beyond Maus, he has contributed influential cartoons and covers to The New Yorker, including the iconic 9/11 cover, demonstrating his ability to communicate complex emotional and cultural truths with economy and symbolic resonance. His artistic sensibility reflects influences from early twentieth-century cartoonists, modernist design, typography, and the visual language of newspapers and advertising, while also incorporating pop culture, surrealism, and abstraction. Spiegelman has consistently experimented with the interplay of image and text, treating comics as a medium that mirrors cognitive processes of memory, perception, and emotional experience. In addition to his creative output, he has curated exhibitions, edited anthologies, and published critical essays on comics history and theory, advocating for the recognition of the medium as serious art and mentoring generations of cartoonists. He has also worked in graphic design, creating posters, album covers, and commemorative stamps, and his visual interventions often reflect his interest in narrative structure, cultural commentary, and the power of imagery to shape public understanding. Throughout his career, Spiegelman has been a vocal advocate for freedom of expression and a critic of censorship, engaging in public discourse on political and social issues, and demonstrating how comics can address profound ethical and historical questions. His pioneering work, editorial vision, and relentless innovation have transformed both the aesthetics and the intellectual reception of comics, proving that the medium can handle grief, history, and identity with sophistication, subtlety, and emotional resonance. Spiegelman’s legacy is evident in the work of contemporary graphic novelists and in the broader cultural recognition of comics as an art form capable of exploring human experience, social commentary, and the complexities of memory and trauma, making him one of the most influential figures in modern visual storytelling.

Reviews

[Isabella · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some of the stories in this book were very heartwarming and beautiful to read. Others I did not understand and some just did not like. Overall, the book was one I was happy I read once. Other than that.... I'm happy I finished it.

[Jadyn · Rating 2 out of 5]

It wasn't the best book, but I finally finished it!

[Alex Braddy · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is incredibly moving and tells so many powerful stories simultaneously. Each word is weighed with meaning and a have never felt more connected to a fictional child than in this book.

[Anna Biljan · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is not the book version of the documentaries I immerse myself into each year on 9/11. Instead, there are some firsthand accounts, some creative interpretations, some tales entirely irrelevant to the events of that day. The back and forth is fitting, it matches the aftermath of that day as I imagine it truly was: endless remembering of what had just happened, occasionally interrupted by a “real life” that had gone on unaffected.

[behsforensics]

Cutting is for Report from Liberty Street
By Charles Bernstein

[Zoe · Rating 3 out of 5]

An interestingly eclectic collection of short stories, poems, opinion pieces and personal reflections that address, among other things, the apparent crisis in representation that many authors, artists and cultural commentators encountered following the horrific events of September 11, 2001. How to write when, as one contributor comments, 'everything feels like "before," and nothing "before" gives comfort'? Also included are a number of pieces written prior to 9/11 which take on an increased resonance after the attacks, and so somehow prophetically encapsulate the nebulous post-9/11 moment.

Amid declarations in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 that 'everything had changed' and that 'nothing would ever be the same', such a collection seems necessary. Its hasty publication (2002) attests to the apparently cathartic demand for such a text; indeed, the collection as a whole emphasises the (assumed) healing power of literature, whilst simultaneously questioning how to comprehend, or even approach, such an essentially incomprehensible event. '110 Stories' is, then, an important collection since it documents fictionally, poetically, rhetorically and sometimes provocatively, many of the issues and anxieties that dominated 'post-9/11' culture. More importantly, perhaps, read ten years after its initial publication, the collection emerges as culturally and/or artistically significant in the way in which it now historicizes the immediate post-9/11 moment - characterised by uncertainty, anxiety, and artistic futility - and gestures toward the evolution of a more cohesive body of literature that addresses the broader artistic, political and sociological concerns of the event. While exploring similar concerns, these early pieces are markedly dissimilar from the less frenetic, more calculated (and more stylized?) narrative responses to 9/11 and its aftermath, that have been published in recent years. In other words, while many of the contributions here are vibrant and all are poignant, as expected in a collection published so soon after, the pieces included are largely speculative and anxious, as if they're testing the cultural terrain for the later, more fully-formed and assured literatures which would later come to define the 'post-9/11' genre. As speculative narratives, however, these earlier pieces are vital to the genesis of such later texts, and so should not be overlooked. Moreover, since they perfectly encapsulate those days, weeks, and months 'after' in which uncertainty ruled, they emerge as 'stories' that demand to be read.