If you spend enough time listening to audiobooks, you will eventually find yourself somewhere in New York City. Regardless of the genre, the city is the ideal environment for stories. Even if you've never visited, you may find yourself comfortable with various locales and the people who inhabit them. Several recent nonfiction audiobooks capture not just the environment of the city, but its impact on the people who call the city home and the culture beyond the city's limits. Listening to these performances, it's enlightening to hear how many of these different recollections and interviews intersect.

Tourmaline's MARSHA: The Joy and Defiance of Marsha P. Johnson provides a chronicle of the life of Johnson, an activist, self-described drag queen, and luminary figure for LGBTQIA+ rights. Tourmaline reminds her audiences that Marsha was there at the Stonewall Uprising. Her journey includes life on 42nd and Christopher Street, becoming a fixture of Greenwich Village. Tourmaline's reverence for Marsha is clear throughout her narration, even when Bellevue Hospital appears in the narrative, a place where people like Marsha were sent for treatment, but also to remove them from the public spaces they had every right to inhabit.

Yoko Ono knew who Marsha P. Johnson was. Tourmaline notes that John Lennon and Yoko Ono joined an audience for one of Marsha's performances in the 1970s. David Sheff's YOKO: A Biography, narrated by Max Meyers, gives a detailed history of the life of one of the world's more polarizing artists, while also taking listeners to legendary NYC locations. The Dakota Apartments is the famous building that Yoko Ono and John Lennon called home for years. The two recorded their final album together at the Hit Factory studio before Lennon was assassinated at the entrance of the Dakota. Despite this horrific event, Ono continued to work, perform, and live in New York City.

Listening to Susan Morrison's LORNE: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live, listeners inhabit the same general timeline as Marsha and Yoko. In the early 1970s, Lorne Michaels moved to New York City from Los Angeles to produce a new show to fill a dead time slot—Saturday evenings at midnight. The result, of course, is the 50-year run of Saturday Night Live, produced and performed from 30 Rockefeller Center. Kristen DiMercurio delivers a performance that's so involving, listeners won't mind the more than twenty-hour running time.

Keith McNally, New York restaurateur, got to know Michaels around the time SNL started gaining traction with viewers. The cast and crew would hold their after-show parties where McNally worked. In his audiobook I REGRET ALMOST EVERYTHING: A Memoir, McNally reflects on his friendship with Michaels, and on the many famous faces that have passed through his dining spaces. Richard E. Grant provides a narration so compelling, every moment and recollection is conveyed with a gentle, authoritative gravitas.

Throughout it all, there was a print news magazine covering NYC, while also having an impact on the wider culture. The Village Voice was the reporting outlet that would go where legacy media of the day would not. In THE FREAKS CAME OUT TO WRITE , Tricia Romano provides a detailed oral history of the writers who covered Greenwich Village. The Voice staffed a number of gay and lesbian writers, capturing the spirit of the city in the publication’s heyday: the 1970s and early 1980s, before the internet took over and shifted the media landscape irrevocably. Johnny Heller and Jo Anna Perrin convey the life and times in their consistent, steady performance of this sprawling, fascinating history.

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Stephen Cummings is an AudioFile reviewer and also contributes to AudioFile's podcast, Behind the Mic