From the author of the beloved and critically acclaimed Insomniac City, a poignant and profound tribute in stories and images to a city amidst a pandemic—an ode to our shared humanity.

A bookstore where readers shout their orders from the street. A neighborhood restaurant turned to-go place where one has a shared drink—on either end of a bar—with the owner. These scenes, among many others, became the new normal as soon as the world began to face the COVID-19 pandemic.

In How We Live Now, author and photographer Bill Hayes, with his signature insight and grace, captures these moments of life in real time—as things unfold day-by-day, hour-by-hour, in this strange new world we’re now in (for who knows how long?), with its new sets of rules and guidelines, its suddenly deserted streets, shuttered restaurants, bars, shops, and stores. As he wanders the increasingly empty streets of Manhattan, Hayes meets fellow New Yorkers and discovers stories to tell, but he also shares the unexpected moments of grace and gratitude he finds from within his apartment, where he lives alone and—like everyone else—is staying home, trying to keep busy and not bored as he adjusts to enforced solitude with reading, cooking, reconnecting with loved ones, reflecting on the past—and writing.

Featuring Hayes’s inimitable street photographs, How We Live Now chronicles an unimaginable moment in time, offering a long-lasting reminder that what will get us through this unprecedented, deadly crisis is each other.

“Bill Hayes has unwrapped a New York under wraps during the lockdown.
He is, in his photos and writings, the great poet of the everyday.” – Edmund White

“When I think of the great photographers who have depicted this city–Elliot Erwitt, Helen Leavitt, Diane Arbus, Gordon Parks to name only a few–Hayes adds to this bounty….” — Philip Clark, Lambda Literary 

 

“After his stirring memoir of Oliver Sacks and New York, Hayes turns his sensitive, sympathetic lens to the human poetics coursing through the streets of the iconic city at all hours of the day and night, across every social stratum, every age, every feeling-tone. From the hipsters and the homeless and the protesters and the lovers — oh so many lovers — emerges a chorus of humanity singing the siren song of New York.”

— BrainPickings

“A beautiful companion to Insomniac City and a standalone volume that captures the comedy, tragedy, and magic in the everyday.”
— Erin Kodicek, Omnivoracious, The Amazon Book Review

“Just in time for Valentine’s Day, this love letter in photos documents a diverse range of city dwellers while capturing both the excitement and loneliness of living among them.” — Named one of the “Top 10” Art & Photography Books by Publishers Weekly

“How New York Breaks Your Heart. . . immortalizes ordinary people in the city that never sleeps.” — The New York Times

“A photographic love letter to New York City and its people that is sparse in text but loaded with images and feeling. . . . With every photo, Hayes captures the casual intimacy of his subjects with their natural habitat to show what’s most heartwarming about the city: the rare, diverse, and vital spirit of the people in it.”
— Publishers Weekly

 

“There’s wistfulness in Hayes’ title, for the beauty that breaking reveals. With his photos, Hayes seems to say that if a city breaks your heart, look to its people to piece it back together again.”  – Booklist

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Named 'One of the Best Books of the Year' by Amazon.

A beautifully written once-in-a-lifetime book, about love, about life, soul, and the wonderful loving genius Oliver Sacks, and New York, and laughter and all of creation.

Anne Lamott

This touching memoir of the late neurologist Oliver Sacks, by a photographer and writer with whom he fell in love near the end of his life, turns a story of death into a celebration.

The New Yorker

Bill Hayes came to New York City with a one-way ticket, all of his belongings, and only the vaguest idea of how he would get by. But, at forty-eight years old, having spent decades in San Francisco, he wanted a change. Grieving over the recent death of his partner, Hayes discovered quickly that the city, however ruthless its reputation, can also be a profoundly consoling place.

Within the city’s incessant rhythms, Hayes found companionship in unlikely sources—in the tree branches framed by his apartment window, in the sight of the Empire State and Chrysler buildings against the night sky, and in New Yorkers themselves, those strangers who, striving side by side, sometimes turn to face one another. A lifelong insomniac, Hayes took to wandering the city at night with a camera, gazing up at skyscrapers, meandering through deserted parks, and having chance encounters with other sleepless city dwellers. And he fell in love again, against all expectations, with his friend and neighbor, Oliver Sacks.

The stories in Insomniac City are drawn together by Hayes’ generosity of spirit, and by his photographs of urbanites that find beauty even in the ordinary. Bookended by two painful losses in Hayes’ life, this memoir is both a meditation on grief and a celebration of ongoing life. It’s also a love song to the city—not just to New York, but to all cities, and to all who have felt the particular magic and solace they offer.

For a selection of reviews and interviews on “Insomniac City,” click here.

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An intimate and sharply drawn portrait of one of the giants of science. This is a rare book.

Jad Abumrad, co-host of RadioLab

A unique and exuberant celebration of life and love.

Kirkus Reviews

A love letter—to New York City and to renowned science writer Oliver Sacks....Remarkably poignant.

Publishers Weekly

I loved every single sentence in this quiet night-book, erotic and evocative, at once.

Terry Tempest Williams, author of The Hour of Land

Like New York, the city he celebrates so poignantly in this book, Bill Hayes mixes 'memory with desire' to create a heartbreakingly gorgeous story of love and loss.

Azar Nafisi, author of Reading Lolita in Tehran

Insomniac City is a beautiful memoir in which Oliver Sacks comes wonderfully to life--a double portrait that also provides a vivid picture of New York City's neighborhoods and people. The ending is exquisitely wrought, heartrending and joyous.

Joyce Carol Oates

The classic medical text known as Gray’s Anatomy is one of the most famous books ever created. In this masterly work of creative nonfiction, Bill Hayes uncovers the extraordinary lives of the seminal volume’s author and illustrator while providing a “scalpel’s-eye” view into the ingenuity of the human body.

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For as far back as he can remember, Hayes has had trouble sleeping. He’d wander his parents’ house at night, “existing on nothing but the fumes of consciousness,” jealously wondering how everyone else slipped into dreamland so easily. From these nocturnal ramblings grew an unblinking, lifelong fascination with sleep (or the absence of it), which Hayes has transmuted into a skilled and graceful work of narrative nonfiction that variously reads like a journey of scientific discovery, a personal memoir and a literary episode of Ripley’s Believe It or Not.

This updated edition from the University of Chicago Press includes a new Preface by the author.

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From ancient Rome, where gladiators drank the blood of vanquished foes to gain strength and courage, to modern-day laboratories, where machines test blood for diseases and scientists search for elusive cures, Bill Hayes takes us on a whirlwind journey through history, literature, mythology, and science by way of the great red river that runs five quarts strong through our bodies. As much a biography of blood as it is a memoir of how this rich substance has shaped one man’s life, Five Quarts is by turns whimsical and provocative, informative and moving.

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