A Maxim Map of Manhattan

A Maxim Map of Manhattan is a mosaic portrait of one of our planet's most iconic urban settings. Dense and teeming like the island borough it depicts, its pages form a collage of offbeat witticisms, concocted vignettes, and surreal social critiques grouped into thematic neighborhoods.

Spinning an alternative and non-linear history, this parody of a tourist guide serenades its target locale's renegade spirit and offers up an ode of praise to its noted talent for reinvention. The book's fragmentary format spans an eclectic range of topics, including public art, global dialects, seasonal wardrobe, macroeconomics, civil engineering, and culinary trends on its overspilling menu.

While Manhattan resists being truly captured by any single profile, several of its key features are productively distorted in this gallery of funhouse mirrors. A Maxim Map of Manhattan "maps" not by laying down grid lines of latitude and longitude, but by playfully assembling its pieces into a deliberately bottomless puzzle.

Kimo RedeR is a widely published scholar and poet/essayist and an Associate Professor of English at the City University of New York's Borough of Manhattan campus. His current writing projects include a series of esoteric meditations on the human hand, an inverted account of the Tower of Babel, and an index of post-Wittgensteinian "rogue linguistics."