Acclaimed artist Kenneth Goldsmith's thousand-page beautiful homage to New York City

Here is a kaleidoscopic assemblage and poetic history of New York: an unparalleled and original homage to the city, composed entirely of quotations. Drawn from a huge array of sources-histories, memoirs, newspaper articles, novels, government documents, emails-and organized into interpretive categories that reveal the philosophical architecture of the city, Capital is the ne plus ultra of books on the ultimate megalopolis.

It is also a book of experimental literature that transposes Walter Benjamin's unfinished magnum opus of literary montage on the modern city, The Arcades Project, from 19th-century Paris to 20th-century New York, bringing the streets to life in categories such as "Sex," "Commodity," "Downtown," "Subway," and "Mapplethorpe."

Capital is a book designed to fascinate and to fail-for can a megalopolis truly be written? Can a history, no matter how extensive, ever be comprehensive? Each reading of this book, and of New York, is a unique and impossible passage.

"Capital scintillates . Goldsmith has produced a book that reminds us how close we can still get, via the labour of sound and thought and syntax, to the rhythms of a real city." - Guardian

"Goldsmith's material, unmistakably real, refuses to remain in a literary frame." - Bookslut

"[Goldsmith] gives you the feel of what it is like to be living in New York now." - New Yorker

"A skyscraper of words-literary, journalistic, poetic, and prosaic-to celebrate and chronicle teeming Gotham. The title alludes to Walter Benjamin, and the conceit is one to do him proud . there is an embarrassment of riches here." - Kirkus Reviews

"Reading Capital feels like walking the city, through time and space, jumping neighborhoods, going in and out of buildings, slipping through wormholes. It's a kind of exuberant eavesdropping on the muttering, shouting narrative of the twentieth-century city." - Vanishing New York

"Capital is . meant to be dipped into, to surprise, like a chance encounter on the street. The infinite richness of the city is an apt form for [Goldsmith's] ambition. Capital is a book to get lost in for hours, like some obscure corner of the Lower East Side; it helps us see the universe in a chunk of asphalt." - Financial Times

"The spirit of a city constantly wrestled with and romanticized all out of proportion suffuses Capital." - Wall Street Journal

"Capital could be seen as Goldsmith scaling up, a skewed take on the Great American Novel." - Guardian

"[Capital] is an extravagantly complex construction, opening with a cinematic sweep of the city as a dream-like impossibility, then diving down from sky to earth, languishing in the street before digging underground and emerging to the sky, the weather, the atmosphere and, finally, the apocalypse . [Be] astounded by this epic, ten-year effort to shape an impossible portrait of a miraculous city which-as EB White puts it-should never have existed." - Art Monthly

"As massive, intimidating and fascinating as its subject . The book is much like the city it describes: once you start exploring, you won't want to stop." - Spectrum Culture

"A fascinating work. Kenneth Goldsmith has set before us a Petronian feast in which every page offers up a toothsome morsel to anyone with an interest in New York and its pre-eminent place in the cultural life of the twentieth century." - Times Literary Supplement