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{{infoboxinfobox1
|title=Why We Came to the City
|author=Kristopher Jansma
|website=http://www.kristopherjansma.com/
|video=a8a0wO7crAA
|amazonukcover=<amazonuk>0525426604</amazonuk>|amazonusaznuk=0525426604|aznus=<amazonus>0525426604</amazonus>
}}
''We came to the city because we wished to live haphazardly, to reach for only the least realistic of our desires, and to see if we could not learn what our failures had to teach, and not, when we came to live, discover that we had never died. We wanted to dig deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to be overworked and reduced to our last wit.''
From those first lines adapting Thoreau's ''Walden'' ('I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately…') onward, Kristopher Jansma's second novel is full of literary references. That first-person plural narration, used to great effect in three short chapters of the novel, indicates that this is an ensemble cast. The perspective and focus shift between five university friends as they struggle to hold onto health, love and professional success in recession-era New York City. Friendship sustains them throughout, with echoes of ''The Iliad'' and other classic works of literature lending weight to their everyday heroics.

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