Barstool Prophets is not just the coming-of-age story of a young writer working in a bar in New York's East Village, but also the chronicle of an iconic neighborhood and its wild spectrum of characters. From a love-addled bartender to a suicidal doorman to the junkies in Tompkins Square Park, they are a family, of sorts. In many cases, this is the only family some of them have, complete with all the joys and dysfunctions. The nameless narrator guides himself, the reader and, in some ways, the entire neighborhood through the highs and lows of the past and into the present.