Publishing the book just two weeks after his ninetieth birthday, Schrader-a lifelong New Yorker- offers a vivid memoir in vignettes that captures both the arc of his own life and the portrait of a shifting 20th century New York. Schrader's autobiographical sketches reveal a writer processing the evolution and moments of resonance in his life, and the changing of a city and world around him.

Rich with autobiographical sketches that will recall those of Annie Dillard in An American Childhood and Tobias Wolff in This Boy's Life, Schrader traces his journey from a daydreaming child of the 1930s Upper West Side to the anxieties and desires of a postwar adolescence, to the tensions of a creative impulse and a drive to prove himself to his father and brother amid the family clothing business. Schrader crafts an intimate portrait of his tangled relationship with the creative impulse, the making of money, and his family.

The stories Schrader unearths—told with hilarity, tenderness, and an incredible eye for detail—surprise and delight. Readers are treated to memories ranging from the surprising (watching his teenage brother spar with the son of gangster Meyer Lansky at the boxing gym-and then pulling on his legs to help him get tall enough to be admitted to West Point), to the unfortunate (he describes the lifelong regret of having left a 1961 Greenwich Village folk show just before a young Bob Dylan took the stage), to the tender and the heartbreaking. "Even now my neck turns red at the memory," he says of an elementary school incident in which he fails to stand up for a bullied classmate.

"This book was a life and death thing-to get these stories recorded," Schrader said. "This project gave me some hope that I could explain myself to me, and that someone reading it might see themselves in it as well."

Drawing upon moments across his nine decades of experience, Schrader quilts a memoir of resonance, tenderness, and wit. The Other Steve Schrader is a remarkable testament to memory and connection.

Steven Schrader is a lifelong New Yorker. Born in Washington Heights in 1935, he moved with his family to the Upper West Side at the age of fourteen, and never left. Over the years, he has been a public-school teacher, a city employee (the Welfare Department, the New York City Youth Board), a garment salesman, and the publisher of Cane Hill Press. For ten years he was the director of Teachers & Writers Collaborative. His five books of autobiographical stories include three from Hanging Loose Press: What We Deserved, Threads and Arriving at Work. His work has been included in several anthologies and broadcast on NPR's Selected Shorts. He is married to the documentary filmmaker Lucy Kostelanetz.

"Schrader delivers a tour of, seemingly, unremarkable life experiences that include the inescapable blunders of youth to the more consequential misadventures of an adult world. In these deft, understated and interrelated vignettes, Steven Schrader invests each narrative with a kind of deadpan craftiness that makes us flinch just when we least expect to." — Wesley Brown, author of Dance of the Infidels and Blue in Green

"Underlying what Schrader says and how well he says it are the tensions between expression and repression, humor and pain... this collection seems far from a peripheral bauble. Rather, it combines perception, ability and courage: it knocks me out." — Donna Brook, the American Book Review

"What Schrader offers is pages where every word lights up, every sentence has a mission, every scene explodes with an epiphany. In spite of its brevity, it feels as large and rich as New York City." — Meredith Sue Willis, Novelist, children's book author, and nonfiction writer on the writing process

"...It is as if another human being has... told you everything he possibly could, over... a subway ride or a cup of tea—a life so particular, so Manhattan, so Jewish, so garment district, so privileged yet so impoverished and so full of longing, [that] it belongs to all of us." — Alan Appel, author of The Rabbi of Casino Boulevard and The Hebrew Tutor of Bel Air