Come Back in September: A Literary Education on West Sixty-seventh Street, Manhattan

New Book of the Week by Darryl Pinckney In 1973, as a Columbia undergraduate, Pinckney talked his way into Elizabeth Hardwick's writing class, and—at least for the decade and a half covered by this wonderful book—he never left. Nearly 40 years her junior, this aspiring writer from a middle-class black family in Indiana became her student, protégé, friend, and confidant, and a part of the brainy, gossipy world that swirled around the New York Review of Books, while his pals his age, like Luc (later Lucy) Sante, Jim Jarmusch, and Jean-Michel Basquiat, were creating their own scene downtown. His memoir is a tender and sharply observed tribute to Hardwick's fierce brilliance and a stylish journal of his messy and ambitious young life as a reader and writer. It's hard to imagine a book better engineered to my particular obsessions than this one, but its beauty and wisdom are also what made it my favorite book of the year.