Upstate Now: Art, Design, and Rural Life in the Hudson Valley and Catskills

This inviting survey from husband-and-wife duo Arnaud (Forever Paris), a photographer, and Creech, a book agent and editor, aims to bring the Hudson Valley out from the shadow of New York City. Arnaud, a 30-year resident whose lovely photos fill the book’s pages, sees the region as more than an exoticized getaway for burned-out urbanites. While acknowledging its history as a place where new people are continually mixing in with longtime residents, he remarks that this is also the “underlying story of America.” The book’s other introduction, by Ann Sublett, similarly reflects on admixture as the region’s defining quality. As the Hudson River mixes saline water with fresh water to create its unique ecosystem, so too, she writes, does the “flow of people to and away from New York City and into the Hudson Valley” create unique communities. The places highlighted are embodiments of this dialectic between old and new: there’s Roxbury, N.Y., once so depressed that its most famous son, robber baron Jay Gould, fled as soon as he could, but now a trendy “hamlet on the rise”; and an early Shaker settlement preserved in Albany, right next to an airport. The result is a lively celebration of a place full of passion, and a wonderful primer for newcomers, of which, as this book suggests, there will always be many. (Sept.)