Above Sugar Hill

Sugar Hill is the area between 145th Street and 155th street in Manhattan, the place the best known residents of Harlem livedPaul Robeson, Duke Ellington, and W. E. B. Du Bois all once lived there. North of Sugar Hillabove itis Washington Heights. If you walk into a shop and look for maps of Manhattan, if you download a map meant for visitors to New York, you won't find either placethey have been excised from most guides to New York.These stories take place in Upper Manhattan between 1973 and 2001a Puerto Rican Independentista fends off the FBI while she looks after her friends' children, a young girl spots Marilyn Monroe more than ten years after Monroe's suicide, an opera-singing housing activist goes missing and presumed to have been murdered."Where I come from is tiny," observes the narrator of one of the stories. "Women run the short block screaming when their purses get snatched. Blam blams and the fire of flying heat cut the...