My city is my subject. It’s the only place I’ve ever wanted to live. If I’m somewhere else I think of this place every day. Jeff Ford said New York was like a character in a lot of my stories and that seems right. Several of these stories, “On Death and the Deuce,” “There’s a Hole in the City,” “The Ferryman’s Wife,” “The Mask of the Rex,” were adapted into chapters in my novels. What you read here is each story as it originally appeared.