Joel Feingold, the researcher who worked with the late historian Mike Wallace on the final two books of his epic Gotham trilogy, including the newly published Gotham at War, visits Lit NYC to talk with Harry Siegel about what went into making an epic poem of the city weaving accurate history into myth to try and tell nothing less than the story of the whole world, New York's In Uno Plures tradition — Out of One, Many — as a correction to the American motto, still printed on our money, of E Pluribus Unum, or Out of Many, One, and much more.

In the spirit of the books, it's a sweeping conversation touching on everything and everyone from Martin Scorsese to Zohran Mamdani, what Robert Caro might have got wrong about Robert Moses, and much more.

New York Times obituarist Sam Roberts talks with Harry Siegel about his new book, Are They Dead Yet, writing about the dead on deadline, and much more.

For the last decade, artist, animator, illustrator and performer R Sikoryak has been putting America’s founding documents into conversation with iconic images and characters from comics and cartoons.

That started with the Constitution — “there’s a document everyone says you should read and I wanted to make it readable by adding visuals” — and his new book, Declaration / Emancipation Illustrated, continues with those two documents along with the Gettysburg Address.

In a wide-ranging conversation with Lit NYC host Harry Siegel, Sikoryak talks about getting to New York, cutting his teeth at Art Spiegelman and Françoise Mouly’s underground cartoon anthology Raw and its ‘Narrative Corpse,” his Masterpiece Comics like Batman’s Crime and Punishment and Charlie Brown’s Metamorphosis, and much more.

When a white man shot four Black teens inside a subway car before disappearing into a tunnel just before Christmas Eve in 1984, young reporter Jon Kalish was assigned to the story by NPR.

When Bernhard Goetz turned himself on New Year's Eve, confessing that "I wanted to waste them all," what came next seemed clear to Kalish.

Instead, the Manhattan district attorney struggled to even indict Goetz before a jury eventually acquitted him of all charges except for possession of an unlicensed gun.

Four decades later, Kalish looks back on a shooting that left a wound that never fully healed, by a shooter who still lives in here, and how it was covered at the time — with “the celebration of a man with an illegal .38‑caliber revolver firing it again and again on a crowded train.”

The Metropolitan Diary — the longest-running column in The New York Times — turns 50 this year. For a half century, a page that was introduced as part of a push to relieve the publication’s stuffy reputation has been the only one in the paper of record where ordinary, so to speak, inhabitants of the paper’s namesake city could read, and publish, brief stories and bits of doggerel about ordinary life here.

Ed Shanahan, who’s curated the page for the last decade, joins Lit NYC host Harry Siegel for a deep dive into the diary, the online community that’s developed around a pre-internet institution and those glorious days of yore when every successful contributor was rewarded with a bottle of Moët.

Kim Deitch, a second-generation illustrator, has been at it since he start selling strips (and dope) to The East Village Other in 1967. His new book, How I Make Comics, is full of interlocking comics connected by comics about making comics, with Kim and his wife Pamela Butler as characters in those comics as what started off as a gag title became something much more — beginning with a too-good-to-check yarn about Kim's boyhood encounter with Donald Trump on the Howdy Doody Show and with fiction and truth only getting stranger from there.

Harry Siegel visited Kim and Pam in their studio on the Upper East Side for an in-depth conversation about the book, their partnership, his turn toward the autobiographical and the importance of a good yarn.

"It’s a tour for people who like the nitty gritty of why we had so much sewage, why corruption led to the garbage being a problem for so long, what our policies were that caused this rat issue. It's an urban policy and urban planning tour with rats and some sex facts, including rat sex."

Suzanne Reisman, author of Off the Beaten (Subway) Track, New York City's Best Unusual Attractions, joins host Amy Sohn to discuss her Garbage and Rats in New York walking tour, visiting an art star’s troll museum, and much more, including Eric Adams’ rat-eradication legacy.

John Strausbaugh, the longtime editor of fNew York Press, joins Amy Sohn — who kicked off her career there as a 22-year-old columnist there — and guest host Brian Berger of Strauss Media for a deep dive into the late, great and occasionally lamented alt-weekly that humbled the then-mighty Village Voice and launched a generation of new writers.