Essays tracing the intellectual life of a quintessential New York City writer and thinker

Marshall Berman was one of the great urbanists and Marxist cultural critics of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and his brilliant, nearly sui generis book All That Is Solid Melts Into Air is a masterpiece of the literature on modernism. But like many New York intellectuals, the essay was his characteristic form, accommodating his multifarious interests and expressing his protean, searching exuberant mind. This collection includes early essays from and on the radical '60s, on New York City, on literary figures from Kafka to Pamuk, and late essays on rock, hip hop, and gentrification. Concluding with his last essay, completed just before his death in 2013, this book is Berman's intellectual autobiography, tracing his career as a thinker through the way he read the 'signs in the street'.

"Modernism in the Streets captures both the violent dislocation wrought by political changes and the artistic outputs born out of suffering. Berman's essays make the reader experience historical change as he did-as something urgent, frightening, but also wondrous. With that feeling comes a faint but undeniable hint of possibility." - The New Republic

"A wonderful collection of Marshall's 'life and times in essays,' a treasure trove of five decades' living and writing for the city, lovingly consecrated by Dissent and Nation editor David Marcus, all done with the blessing of Marshall's widow, Shellie. At last those books-in-progress have been consummated as an organic whole; the incomplete has been posthumously assembled in One Bright Book of Marshall's Life...Modernism in the Streets makes Marshall whole again, keeps him living, and gives us a new beginning, a genesis." - Jacobin

"Marshall Berman is one of our liveliest and most generous interpreters of Marx...brimming with ideas and romance. He can help us learn to create ourselves while we try to change the world." - Nation

"We must admire Marshall Berman's audacity...Berman persuasively argues that Marx's theory of alienation can best explain the awful consequences of capitalism, even when workers toil at computers rather than assembly lines." - New York Times

"It is the broadness and scale of Berman's vision of modernity that is the power of this collection." - Jacobin

"Modernism in the Streets is a comprehensive testament to singular style with which Berman espoused, with equal urgency and earnestness, the tragedies and triumphs of modernity, and its continuing impact on the ways we navigate urban space." - The Culture Trip