That piece inspired her fictionalized portrait of a celebrated neighborhood fixture who “was charismatic and generous, and led a very big life for someone who barely left a twenty-block radius.” Manning her ticket booth, walking the streets, Mazie helped many people who were homeless, especially during the Great Depression. It makes sense then that after 2012’s bestselling Midwest family saga “The Middlesteins” she should return to New York with her new book, “Saint Mazie,” an engaging work of historical fiction based on the life of Mazie Phillips-Gordon, a woman once known as “Queen of the Bowery.”Īttenberg first discovered Mazie - who was the ticket taker and proprietress of the Venice, a movie theater in the heart of the Lower East Side - when a friend suggested she read a 1940 profile by the New Yorker’s Joseph Mitchell. In addition to having published four novels and a short-story collection since 2006, Jami Attenberg once went viral for busting a bike thief in Brooklyn, which makes her one of the most New York authors of the 21st century, as far as I’m concerned.
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