BERNARD ISAACS

The Hermit

Democity · Prenzlauer Berg

The Hermit's story:

Bernard Isaacs has lived in the abandoned Amtrac tunnel that runs under Riverside Park in the Upper East Side of Manhattan since the late 1980s. A novelist and longtime critic for the small magazines, he writes mostly at night and rarely on deadline; his last book — a slim study of New York's vanishing second-hand bookshops — was the kind of thing only a city like this could still produce. He keeps a deliberately analogue routine: mornings at the Hungarian Pastry Shop with a notebook, long afternoons in the Rose Reading Room, evenings walking a borrowed dog from Riverside down to the West 79th boat basin. He doesn't have a phone he answers, doesn't go to openings, and is, by his own description, on extremely good terms with three booksellers and one bartender.