Bill Hayes has unwrapped a New York under wraps during the lockdown. He is, in his photos and writings, the great poet of the everyday.

Edmund White

A touching volume . . . The photos serve as potent documentation of an unprecedented time.

Kirkus Reviews

This is a love story - for one particular man in the love affair that began as the pandemic did, for the city of New York and its people coping with an unanticipated catastrophe, for what words can do, for the light and darkness, shade and illumination of black-and-white street photography, for wandering and encountering and seeing, for being truly a citizen of the city and an inhabitant of the streets. Even at a moment when we were all supposed to withdraw from each other How We Live Now reaches out

Rebecca Solnit

[A] loving tribute to Sacks and to New York . . . Frank, beautiful, bewitching-[Hayes's photographs] unmask their subjects' best and truest selves.

Jennifer Senior, New York Times on INSOMNIAC CITY

Poetic and profound . . . A lyrical reminder that happiness and heartache are inseparably entwined . . . Insomniac City is an ineffably splendid read in its entirety, a mighty packet of pure aliveness.

Maria Popova, Brain Pickings on INSOMNIAC CITY

Like Patti Smith's haunting M Train, Hayes' book weaves seemingly disparate threads of memory into a kind of sanctuary . . . where one can shake off the treasured relics of past lives and prepare to be reborn anew.

San Francisco Chronicle on INSOMNIAC CITY