New Days weaves ten unforgettable stories of love, loss, ambition, and resilience, revealing how a city continually transforms while the human longing for connection remains timeless. Why did you choose a short story collection rather than a single continuous narrative to tell the city’s story?

These stories have been brewing in the back of my mind over the last few years, as I slowly approached my 20th year of living in New York City. I had considered fleshing out one or two of them into their own novels, but it became clear that the truest way to pay tribute to New York’s unique history, impressive diversity, constant transient change, and ever-evolving culture was to celebrate a variety of moments across the distinctions of particular eras. Despite each chapter taking place in a particular historical corner of New York’s legacy, they do offer commonality of experiences people often find while living in this complex metropolis. Many New Yorkers can relate to the emotional themes imbued in each chapter, whether that’s the idea of first coming here and the familiar home and family we leave behind, our initial arrival and assimilation into a new world, the challenging search for a new identity as we try to set roots here, the blending of perspectives when we share our lives with people from completely differing backgrounds, or the social bonds we try to hold dear as the environment around us perpetually transforms. While working on my longer novels, New Days was always something I came back to from time to time to add another chapter or experience. A unique form of journaling my life here through allegory and historical reflection. I felt that the short story collection format was the truest way to say that all of these reflections had their distinct value, rather than focusing on a single one to expand above the others.

Why do you believe the search for belonging remains such a powerful theme across different generations and historical circumstances?

Humans are social creatures, and we’re always measuring our existence across connections, purpose, and belonging. But New York is an exceptionally special place in that regard, because compared to other cities whose identities are tied to heritage, tradition, or particular industries, New York’s brand has always been about reinvention of self, fresh start opportunities, and carving out a path for new dreams. We mostly all came here from somewhere else. The population ebbs and flows, perpetually supplemented by waves of new arrivals. We have to fit into the city’s pace and progress, but also add our own elements as new ingredients to the overall soup. That dynamic churns our need to belong, to understand ourselves, to seek meaning in our routines and forward momentum. It’s what makes New York so distinct, challenging, and glorious at the same time. Even if we left somewhere else in dissatisfaction, we still have to figure out what that means for our lives in the new frontier we chose.

What inspired the inclusion of black-and-white illustrations, and how do you see them contributing to the reading experience?

The images were an extension of those common themes across such starkly different historical eras. I could have opted for something colorful, or a distinct style that reflected each time period. But the black-and-white consistency and familiar design echoed those recurring experiences that make the New York story so innately understood by anyone who’s spent time here.

Do you envision exploring additional periods of New York’s history or developing similar collections centered on other places?

To be honest, the more I researched different times in this city’s development, the more I realized I probably could have written several more chapters. Or kept this project going indefinitely. But the combination of wanting to finish my larger novel projects and also accepting that all authors eventually have to pick an end point to their work for fear of getting lost in the ceaseless editing process helped me keep it to a neat 10 chapters spanning the entirety of New York’s heritage. As for writing something similar about a different city… that would feel dishonest to me. I know New York. I’ll let someone who knows Rome, Tokyo, or São Paulo write about their corner of the world.

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