An Evening with David Lida
Author of First Stop in the New World: Mexico City, capital of the 21st Century

Discussion, Booksigning and Reception
Thursday, June 12, 2008 at 7PM

Presented in conjunction with the Mexican Cultural Institute of New York

IDLEWILD BOOKS
12 West 19th Street
www.idlewildbooks.com




“Charmingly unaffected, forthright and widely knowledgeable walk through the highs and low of this teeming, complicated, immensely rewarding “hypermetropolis. Lida depicts his adopted hometown with warmth, humor, wisdom and fortitude.”

— Kirkus Reviews

"David Lida shows us a Mexico City that’s not in the guidebooks, but, like a subversive code-breaker, he has pointed out the pathways to its delectably seamy soul. If Burroughs were alive and planning a return visit to Mexico today, he’d want to take this book with him.”

—Jon Lee Anderson, author of Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life and The Fall of Baghdad

A panoramic literary portrait of Mexico Citya a vibrant, seductive, paradoxical city now commanding the worldas attention and showing us the way to the future of urban life.

David Lida moved to Mexico City fifteen years ago in search of a kind of culture, energy, and spontaneity that he thought had been lost in his native New York City. What he found was a thriving, miraculous urban center comprising centuries of living history, even as its rapid development was making it a prominent force on the world stage. Through the eyes of an American who has become an insider, "First Stop in the New World" is a street-level panorama of contemporary Mexico Cityafrom the high arts to the sex industry; from the dense jungle of urban politics to the interactions of everyday commerce; from one end of this five-hundred-square-mile city to the other. Lida expertly captures the kaleidoscopic nature of life in a city defined by pleasure and danger, justice and lawlessness, ecstatic joy and appalling tragedyain limbo between the developed and developing worlds.

While London and Paris have become more homogenous, less captivating, and less surprising since the days when Dickens and Balzac wrote about them, Mexico City points to our urban futureaif Manhattan was, as posited by Rem Koolhaas, the urban aRosetta Stone of the twentieth century, a Mexico City will play that same role in the twenty-first. And with his personal, literary-journalistic account, David Lida will serve as the ultimate chronicler of this exciting city at a vital moment in its history.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR David Lida is an American who has lived in Mexico City for much of the last fifteen years. In the United States, his journalism has been published in The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Culture & Travel, The Forward, Interview, Gourmet and The Village Voice, among others; in Mexico, he wrote and edited (in Spanish) for D.F., which was Mexico City’s equivalent to the New Yorker. He is also the author of an acclaimed book of short stories that take place in Mexico, Travel Advisory, as well as Las llaves de la ciudad, a collection of journalism he wrote in Spanish.