Manhattan Transfer is not a continuous story but more like an album of city life in a metropolitan spectacle. The novel has never been adapted into movies or dramas, to the best of our knowledge. So we decided to use AI art generators to turn our imagination of scenes in the novel into artworks. We generated multiple background images, twelve character portraits, five snapshots of scenes selected from three sections and listed keywords we used in the prompts. Feel free to try it out, and we welcome you to share your experiences with us.    

AI Tools to consider: Dreamstudio; Midjourney

Example: Please find below a scene of Bud Korpenning in Section 1, II Metropolis and the AI-generated artwork.

“He pushed up the window and leaned out. An L train was rumbling past the end of the street. A whiff of coal smoke stung his nostrils. He hung out of the window a long while looking up and down the street. The world’s second metropolis. In the brick houses and the dingy lamplight and the voices of a group of boys kidding and quarreling on the steps of a house opposite, in the regular firm tread of a policeman, he felt a marching like soldiers, like a sidewheeler going up the Hudson under the Palisades, like an election parade, through long streets towards something tall white full of colonnades and stately. Metropolis.“

Keywords: brick houses, lamplight, policeman, metropolis, leaned out window 

See more examples in Section 2 II. Longlegged Jack of the Isthmus, Section 3 IV. Skyscraper, Section 3 III. Revolving Doors, Section 3 IV. The Burthen of Nineveh.