An excerpt from “Let the Great World Spin,” in which Gloria, who lives in a Bronx housing project, is trying to walk home from Manhattan’s Upper East Side:

The streets of Harlem felt like they were under siege—fences and ramps and barbed wire, radios in the windows, kids out on the sidewalks. Up in the high windows, women leaned out on their elbows like they were looking back into a better decade. Below, wheelchair beggars with scraggly beards raced each other to cars stopped at the lights; they took their chariot duel seriously, and the winner dipped to pick a dime off the ground.

I caught glimpses of people’s rooms: a white enamel jar against a window frame, a round wooden table with a newspaper spread out, a pleated shade over a green chair. What, I wondered, were the sounds filling those rooms? It had never occurred to me before but everything in New York is built upon another thing, nothing is entirely by itself, each thing as strange as the last, and connected.