New York’s not a place most people associate with quiet. But it contains tranquil spaces if you know where to look—and Christopher Myers certainly does. He’s found them everywhere from Central Park to the Guggenheim Museum. Capturing a serene side of the city that never sleeps, his enchanting, wordless picture book Night Ride (Kokila, Sept. 29) follows a group of young Black cyclists as they gleefully make their way through Manhattan to the Brooklyn Bridge. Myers answered our questions about his book via email.

What inspired your book?

2025 was a loud year, or at least it felt that way to me. Every day the whiplash of news and events snapped; the outrage machines of social media spun and rattled. I began to think about our need for reflective spaces, for moments of ease and kindness and light, about lullabies and places where I find quiet. Museums, the pond in Central Park, the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. There’s [even] a dedicated bike path in the middle of Times Square, and the tourists, the crowds, and the billboards pouring light out become this almost impressionist blur. 

Why do your characters ride bikes?

There’s a kind of quiet that you can find on a bike that you can’t find anywhere else. You feel like you’re a rock skipping along the surface of the world. When you’re walking, you’re part of everything, you’re eye level with the world. When you’re in a car, you’re set apart, trapped in a little box. But with a bike, you’re in an in-between space—you can be part of everything, but you’re also a little removed. Bikes are so human.

You worked in stained glass, sketching and inking images that were eventually sent to a team of stained-glass makers; their work was then photographed. Tell us about your process.

I had been designing an opera in Detroit, Down in the Valley by Kurt Weill. Opera is wild, because as much as it’s based in sound, it’s also based in quiet. You become so aware of the quiet moments. I ended that piece with a stained-glass tableau across the whole stage. Often, I think how much I want to bring whatever art I make in the other parts of my life, from museums and galleries to theaters, to my favorite audience, young people.

Stained glass is a slow, painstaking process. Each piece is made of hundreds of pieces of colored glass, soldered together with lead and copper. I work with a team of people who make windows in the traditional ways for churches, synagogues, holy places. I design the pieces, thinking through every detail, shape, and color, but then it becomes part of a community. I think about the book itself as a kind of sacred architecture.

The suburbs are often considered the ideal place to raise children, but you depict the city as a place of genuine beauty.

Some myths of childhood persist. Dick and Jane’s suburban fantasy—the blankness of those pages (lots of white space in those books as I remember them)—is still held up as some perfect moment in which childhood is imagined to be almost empty. Especially today, when the world is funneled through our televisions, tablets, and phones, when children are exposed to so much so quickly, perhaps the fantasy of neutral childhoods doesn’t serve as well. It’s almost as if the cultural density of the city has been gifted into everyone’s lives, and we New York City kids can help show how to find wonder, beauty, growth, and quiet in all of it.

Mahnaz Dar is a young readers’ editor.