The Book Bench interviews Michael Idov, whose novel, Ground Up, follows a young couple as they try to open a Viennese cafe in New York, to disastrous results. From the interview, I learn that the book’s epigraph is this quote from Thomas Bernhard, which describes how I feel on the worst days in New York (there are plenty of good days, for which I’ll have to find another quote):

The truth is that I have always hated the Viennese coffeehouse because in them I am confronted with people like myself, and naturally I do not wish to be everlastingly confronted with people like myself.

Idov once briefly opened a coffee shop himself (his account of it is worth a read), and the Book Bench asked for his thoughts on the gentrification of New York:

I am dully fatalistic about gentrification. It’s a cyclical process, and I find community attempts to preserve or curate, say, the remnants of the Lower East Side schmatta trade as unnatural as wanton overdevelopment.