You could be reading Sistah Vegan right now.

For a full list of Lantern's titles available for Kindle, click here.

Lantern Books' office is located in Union Square, one of the hubs of activism in the city. We're on the southwest corner of the park, by the Gandhi statue. Lately, this corner of the park is proving to be the animal advocacy corner.

Mighty Mutts sets up on this corner a couple of days a week trying to find adoptive homes for dogs and cats. My colleague Laura has volunteered for them, but I am not so brave. I usually quickly pat a pit bull cheek or rump and move on, scared I'll end up adding to my bulging family. (Don't tell my cats, but I've been dying to live with a dog for years.) I do always say "thank you" to the tireless volunteers who are dedicated to finding homes for abandoned animals. This ongoing adoption drive must have established this corner as the animal spot, since this week there have been two new arrivals:

What kind of crazy Manhattanites compost? Well, we at Lantern do our little part. Yes, our office saves up our plant clippings, coffee grounds and carrot stubs, and deliver them outside to the compost station at the Union Square Greenmarket.

At home I am the lazy (or patient) kind of composter. I put the stuff in a pile and wait two years. I'm thrilled and a little obsessed, though, when I have the beautiful soil that results for use in my garden.

I'm well aware that not every city dweller has a little patch of land to compost on. I've known a few New Yorkers here and there who have indoor kitchen composters. Some have had issues with smells or fruit flies, but there are those that claim scent-free success. (What, have you never been to a lesbian anarchist potluck?)

Spoiled by our location, we're able to just hand the stuff off to someone else to turn into "black gold". Don't be discouraged by not having a yard or not wanting to deal with bins—a quick online search reveals that many towns have places where your organic "garbage" can be passed off to a gardener!

When we think of New York City, we tend to honor the big financiers and the Broadway babies who’ve made it here—the Rockefeller, Carnegie, Vanderbilt, Morgan and so on. But, apart perhaps from the very mixed blessing of Robert Moses, the engineers, laborers, and others who built the subways, bridges, and tunnels that made it possible for eight million people to come to and from work and generate wealth don’t get their due.

That was the lesson I drew from taking the Circle Line (finally!) on a semi-circular tour of the island of Manhattan. I’d never realized that that Holland and Lincoln tunnels were named after their designers, and that those towers sticking out of the Hudson and East Rivers were ventilation shafts. I’d never paid much attention to them: more shame me. I’d also never considered how much New York is still a working harbor and an industrialized center, full of decrepit, but apparently still functioning factories and derricks, and piles of shale and containers. Apparently, the port of New York is experiencing something of a revival, which nicely offsets the idea of New York as only about the moving of money and trading in abstractions.

I took a cab home on Sunday night. The sky was completely clear, and as we crossed the Brooklyn Bridge I could see the planes lining up to land at La Guardia, while a low-hanging half-moon illuminated the bay and the Statue of Liberty, framed by the lights of southern Manhattan and the traffic on the Gowanus Expressway in Brooklyn.

It had been an intense few days. My brother came to visit, and that meant I could experience the city beyond the daily round of commuting to and from work. My brother hadn't been to NYC since 2000, so he wanted to visit Ground Zero. Although it is now functionally a building site, the place still retains a discretion and solemnity, and visitors were quiet and thoughtful as they looked at the timeline of that day and read the names of the dead. We walked to the Winter Gardens of the World Financial Center, and out onto the walkway of Battery Park City, partly created out of the rock and rubble that was dug up so the World Trade Center could be constructed. There we came across a memorial that lists every police officer killed in the line of duty since the mid-19th century. To my shame, I confess I didn't know it even existed.

At the northwest corner of Union Square, there's an intersection that for years was called "Dead Man's Curve." I can see why they called it that: there must have been a holy mess of traffic accidents in the days before traffic lights. And then there are pedestrians, who are heading every which way, and who have, since 2005, been given a longer light in order to cross. The intersection is where Broadway (traffic, one-way heading south) bends along the top of 16th street (one-way heading west) and Union Square West (one-way heading south), and slides around the square and then continuing south at 14th.

During those dark days, I found myself looking out of the window of my office at Union Square as it finished its long-awaited renovations. Every evening there were protestors against, first, the war in Afghanistan and then the war in Iraq. During the day, dogs played in the dog run, children swung on the swings, and the homeless dogs on the southwest corner and the homeless people on the west and north sides of the park had their vociferous champions. Performers danced and drummed and sang in the shadow of George Washington’s statue; boots representing all of the soldiers who had died to that point were arrayed there during the Republican National Convention in the summer of 2004. People entered and exited the subway; the daffodils and tulips came and went. Each October 2, Indians decorated the statue of Gandhi in the enlarged garden that had been created for him by the New York City Parks Department. A Bradley’s department store was replaced by Whole Foods; other stores closed and opened; and the Green Market expanded further into the park, joining the artists and the man who sells vegetable peelers in the daily whirl of New York City life.

During the days immediately following September 11, I found myself irresistibly going over in my mind the opening passages from the Declaration of Independence, with its self-evident truths of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. It struck me, once again, how bold a statement it was—how deeply radical in its implications, and how subversive of the closed world of privilege it still was after so many centuries and setbacks to its full realization; how confident it was in its self-evidence, brazen in its association of life with liberty and both with happiness. I reveled in its combination of frontiersman ethos and eighteenth-century idealism, on how it saw happiness as a pursuit—both a vain, headlong chase toward an unreachable goal and at the same time an avocation, a considered task befitting the wild romantics and hard-headed rationalists that “Americans” have sometimes imagined themselves to be when they look at people like Daniel Boone, Davy Crockett, Benjamin Franklin, Dale Carnegie, Thomas Edison, Susan B. Anthony, and other determined fighters for self-improvement for all and champions of the individual brilliance of the solitary citizen.

I was drawn deeply to its promises to extend liberty—an American liberty—to all men, and then people, wherever they were, whether they were citizens or not: the right to be free, to think, to congregate, to speak, to practice whatever faith they chose. In the wake of September 11, I too agreed with Le Monde when it declared that we were all Americans now. America was the people—all the people, wherever they were from, whatever they believed, whatever work they did—who died in the towers. If that was America, then, yes, I also was an American.

Over the course of the day of September 11, 2001, and the few days that followed it, I once more fell in love with New York City, my adopted home. I had known as soon as I had arrived on my first visit from England on December 3, 1987, and had alighted from the Carey Bus at Park Avenue South and Forty-Second Street; I had known as soon as I walked into the then dimly lit halls of the then unrenovated Grand Central Station; I had known as soon as I had smelled the gasoline and the energy—that whatever beat my heart wished to pump blood around my system to, it was the same one that pulsed through this particular city.

That evening, as my friend met me on the steps of the New York Public Library and we ascended to the viewing deck of the Empire State Building to look over the bridges, streets, and buildings festooned with lights, followed by a long walk downtown and dinner in a comedy-sketch of a restaurant in Little Italy, I knew this place was where I would end up. It seemed both familiar to me from countless movies and television shows and yet fascinatingly alien. And in this way, I became another self-proclaimed New Yorker.

Fifteen or so minutes before nine o’clock on the morning of September 11, 2001, I was working in my office, when my next-door neighbor rushed in and asked me whether I’d heard that a plane had crashed into the World Trade Center. I told him I hadn’t. I had noticed, however, looking out of my windows, that there were a larger number of people than normal gathered at the corner of Fourteenth Street and University Place. I decided to go downstairs to investigate.

Everybody was looking to the south, down University Place toward Washington Square and then two miles beyond to the twin towers of the World Trade Center burning in the clear, blue sky. When my neighbor had mentioned the World Trade Center had been hit by a plane, I had assumed that he meant a Cessna aircraft or even something smaller that had flown off course. I held this view, even though I should have realized that the towers were two miles away and that the amount of smoke billowing out of them suggested a much bigger aircraft. Yet it seemed impossible to believe that the casualties would be great, or that the buildings could collapse. “They’ll be able to evacuate them,” I remember thinking to myself. “Hopefully, not too many people will have been injured.”

In dense urban environments, desirable real estate is measured vertically and not just horizontally. I never realized quite how tenacious this maxim is until I took a tour of Union Square with a guide who pointed out all the place-sitting buildings around the square.

What do I mean by place-sitting? Take the McDonald's (hidden behind the scaffolding) in the picture. It does a good business, I imagine, but it's nothing like the business it could do if a real estate developer saw the tantalizing amount of space it has above it. In other words, what McDonald's does inside its store is immaterial. It's just sitting there, waiting for someone to come along and buy it out, called by the possibilities of filling all that air space above it. Burgers and fries can't trump real estate values, especially in the very attractive market Union Square presents at the moment. The same is true of the North Fork Bank space at the north end of the park, and, probably, Zen Palate at the east end. It certainly was when a real estate company bought out the one-level discount store at the corner of University and 14th, across from Lantern's office. It's in the process of putting up a nine-story luxury condo building. Watch those spaces!

In my more sanctimonious moments, I take the statue of the Marquis de Lafayette as a sign of the possibility of international cooperation. in my more honest ones, I take the statue as a sign that if there's money to be made, you can get anyone to fight for you. It's also a constant reminder that, whatever the rhetorical grandstanding, the U.S. has a lot to be grateful to the French for, just as much as vice versa. In a park full of unaristocratic statuary (Lincoln, Gandhi, and Washington), the sprezzatura of that of Marie Jean Paul Joseph Roche Yves Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de Lafayette stands out, just as he did in his way. He was a walking oxymoron, an aristocratic revolutionary. He lived in very interesting and very dangerous times, and somehow managed to survive the American Revolutionary War, the Reign of Terror, Napoleon and the end of Napoleon, and the July Revolution of 1830. You've got to admire that.

Now he wouldn't have been the first or last aristocrat who never met an overthrow he didn't want to be part of, but there's something particularly Franco-American in the ingenous enthusiasm mixed with naked opportunism he had for iconoclasm and idealism: P.T. Barnum meets Patrick Henry, or, if you will, François Mitterand meets, well, François Mitterand. So, when I walk on Lafayette past Lafayette, I tip my tricorn hat to him and offer my own Franco-American greeting: Vive la Republique and Show Me the Money.

Right outside our window on Union Square is a statue of Mahatma Gandhi. It serves as a reminder to us, as publishers of many books with a vegetarian message, to keep on walking the talk of ahimsa. The statue's unusual because, like the man himself, it is at ground level and not on a plinth. It was sculpted by Kantilal B. Patel and donated by the Gandhi Memorial International Foundation in 1986. It is placed at the southwest corner of the square, where, a few years ago, the island of green on which it was situated was expanded. Now Gandhi can be seen, marching north, out of a sea of shrubbery into the future.

The statue of Abraham Lincoln that stands at the northern end of Union Square was created by Henry Kirke Brown shortly after Lincoln's death. It is, like the man, larger than life, and poses him conventionally as the Great Emancipator. What I never realized about Lincoln, however, until recently was just how complicated a man he was. In fact, rather than the iconic savior, recent scholarship has focused on Lincoln Agonistes: a man who failed constantly, whose family life was marked by insanity and loss after loss, whose sexuality was a gray area, who was a relatively late convert to complete abolitionism, and who was not only a depressive, but perhaps physically disabled.

In other words, he was a man as wounded and yet as persistent as the Union he saved, a man defined by the lives lost as much as the future maintained; as much by the rage that he unleashed in the Civil War as the liberties he secured. He reminds me of the unfathomable sorrow of genuine leadership, of how the truly great feel the weight of the expectations placed on them. Taylor Branch, a historian of the Civil Rights Movement, has said that when the body of Martin Luther King's 39-year-old body was autopsied, they found that his heart was as old and scarred as that of a 60-year-old man. All that stress and anxiety: MLK literally was dying for his country, even before he was shot. I imagine the 56-year-old Lincoln's heart was in not much better shape when he was shot. You can see the country's sorrows etched on his face and sculpted in his death mask. Contrast it with this face, and consider how much weight this man is carrying for the nation he leads.

Union Square always had something going on in it, but it wasn't always the healthy and salubrious place that it was last Saturday when I strolled through it. The Greenmarket has expanded in the last few years and the the place was packed with a diverse crowd of shoppers. The whole park seemed to smell of sweet earth, vegetables, fruits, and late summer ripeness. There were also more stalls of artists' and artisans' wares than I recall seeing before, and Mighty Mutts (whom I'll write about soon) was back, which was nice. The day before they'd been gearing up for a concert on behalf, of all things, human rights. Sheesh! Could it be any more wholesome?

Let me take you back 120 years, however, to when New York City took its rightful place as a den of iniquity and corruption, mostly focused on the nefarious goings-on at the innocuous looking building on the northeast side of Union Square (see picture). This was Tammany Hall, the central location of the notorious Democratic political machine that ran New York for much of the latter part of the nineteenth century, and reached its apogee in the corrupt administration of Mayor William "Boss" Tweed, who never missed an opportunity to get a kickback or skim some money off a contract. As befitting the political showboating that went on there, the building is now home to the Union Square Theatre, before which it housed the International Ladies Garment Union.