Drink It In: A List of the Best Books About the Best Bars

Literature is filled with great fictional bars, bartenders, and drunks—and cheers to them all. But, in 2018, when I started writing my narrative nonfiction book about Coogan’s, an Irish saloon in New York’s Washington Heights neighborhood, I had a hard time coming up with more than a handful of examples of the kind of book I wanted to create: a mix of memoir, research, and reporting that captured the life of a neighborhood bar and its role as a meeting place and cultural repository for the community it served. Library catalogs yielded a few more titles and, during the years that I worked on my book, a couple of other top-shelf examples were published. Here are my favorites. As with a good beer list, there should be something here for every palate. Salut!

10. Little Chapel on the River: A Pub, a Town and the Search for What Matters Most by Gwendolyn Bounds (2005)

“I had never really belonged to anything except maybe my job,” writes Bounds, a reporter for the Wall Street Journal. Displaced from their Lower Manhattan apartment by the 9/11 attacks, Bounds and her girlfriend Kathryn wash up 50 miles north, in the Hudson River town of Garrison. There the author is slowly welcomed into the ring of regulars at a homely pub and general store operated by a gruff but charming Irishman named Jim Guinan. As Guinan’s health deteriorates and the pub's future comes into question, Bounds, a driven careerist, finds herself embracing a life of barroom camaraderie and small-town communitarianism. She also becomes embroiled in the Guinan family’s succession drama. This is Eat, Pray, Love for the barfly in your life.

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