The City Between Us Fifteen New York Stories by Michael Arturo A matriarch defends her East Harlem stoop. A retired newspaperman discovers a headline from a nonexistent past. A boy who finds a miniature skyscraper that may contain his fate. A window cleaner haunted by a vision he can’t explain. A politician bleeding out on the ice in Central Park. From East Harlem to the West Village, from Park Avenue penthouses to the alleys of Chinatown, The City Between Us traces the invisible threads binding strangers, ghosts, and generations. Each story stands alone, yet together they form a portrait of one restless metropolis—its myths, its ruins, its quiet acts of grace. What distinguishes The City Between Us is its shape-shifting voice: no two stories sound alike. Each alters the boundaries of literary fiction—some told with Baldwin-like clarity, others fractured into metafiction, fable, or surreal allegory. Rose moves with journalistic restraint; Flatiron bends reality into art; The Six Inch Skyscraper turns childhood into myth. Across tones and textures, the collection tests what fiction can contain: pulp and confession, realism and hallucination, satire and sorrow. Divided into five parts— Origins, Monuments, Allegories, Absurdities, and Reckonings —the book moves from working-class tenements to glass towers, from grief to reinvention. Written in a style that fuses realism with noir and surrealism, The City Between Us recalls the moral gravity of James Baldwin , the urban unease of Don DeLillo , and the elegant invention of Italo Calvino . It’s both a portrait and an elegy for New York itself—half illumination, half warning.