The top ten cities in literature

Mark Binelli is the author of the novel Sacco and Vanzetti Must Die! and the newly released Detroit City Is the Place to Be: The Afterlife of an American Metropolis, his first book of nonfiction. Born and raised in the Detroit area, he now lives in New York City.

For Publishers Weekly, he named his ten favorite cities in literature, including:

City Primeval by Elmore Leonard

Detroit! As you can imagine, picking one Motor City book wasn’t easy for me. I almost went with Getting Ghost, Luke Bergmann’s account of his harrowing embed with a pair of teenage drug dealers, which is as visceral and moving as any season of The Wire. But this Elmore Leonard novel perfectly captures the bad old Detroit of a different era (the late Seventies), and citing it gives me the opportunity to ask: why hasn’t any filmmaker adapted this book as a period piece yet?!

Read about the other books on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue