These cats are getting their moment in the sunbeam!
A new book celebrates the city’s fabulous feline denizens with photos and the inside stories on their nine lives. And the launch party for “Felines of New York,” at Littlefield on Nov. 22, will be a gleeful cat-themed comedy party where the kitty-loving crowd can get their toxoplasmosis on, says the book’s author.
“You could call it a cat-related humor variety show, comedians will be telling jokes and stories about cats, singing songs and all sorts of crazy stuff. We’ll also have a vet on hand and crowd-source questions for him to answer about cat health,” said writer and comic Jim Tews.
“Felines of New York” immortalizes more than 100 of the cosmopolitan kitties that occupy our city’s windowsills and alleyways, parodying the serious style of “Humans of New York,” the blog-turned-book that interviews New Yorkers on the street.
Tews started “Felines of New York” as a joke blog, in February of this year, but because the Internet is made of cats, it quickly exploded in popularity. A few months later, he was getting calls from publishers who wanted to put the project on paper. Tews put out an open call out to cat owners across the city to find the dozens of subjects he needed for the book, travelling to their homes to snap the photos himself.
Tews sought to capture the cats in their normal state — usually sitting on a windowsill and looking longingly out on the city, he said. He wrote all of the captions, in which he “interviews” the cats about their purr-sonal lives. A typical response, from Callie in Brooklyn: “I’ve learned so much in my life, but learning how to make people do everything for me was probably the most valuable.”
Some of the captions are purely his invention, but others incorporate the back stories of his subjects, he said.
“If I get a weird story from the owner, I’ll put it in — that’s the direction I definitely want to go,” said Tews. “Some have better stories than others, like if the owners found them half dead on the train tracks or something.”
Although the book is a parody, it is also a tribute to the furry friends that get New Yorkers through so many hard days in the city, according to the author.“New York is a busy place, you’re always around people. Even if you’re introverted, you’re forced to being more of extrovert. Cats offer a contrast for us, they provide a break from all that in a very intense and often emotional way,” he said.
Felines of New York launch party at Littlefield (622 Degraw St. between Third and Fourth avenues in Gowanus, www.littl
