“Marty Supreme”’s Josh Safdie Introduces New Edition of “The Bottom of the Harbor” — See the Cover! (Exclusive)

The Bottom of the Harbor is getting a refresh courtesy of Marty Supreme filmmaker Josh Safdie and artist Joana Avillez!

The book — a classic collection of New York City waterfront stories by Joseph Mitchell — will be re-issued with a new cover and illustrations and a new introduction by Safdie.

“Joseph Mitchell turns over rocks and prods the roley poleys with his pen in the most sensitive way possible,” says the filmmaker, who drew inspiration from Mitchell’s writing as he crafted the setting for Marty Supreme. “The result is one of the greatest portraits of New York City and the lost beautiful souls who inhabit it.”

“I am so excited for people to discover Joseph Mitchell’s incredible — intimate yet sweeping — writing for the first time, and for longtime Mitchell fans to experience these essays come alive in a new way with the help of illustration,” Avillez tells PEOPLE. “This book is both a city book and a nature book. It is full of indelible characters and wild slices of life, flourishing and forgotten; New York worlds both big and small connected by its harbor roots.”

She noted that she grew up in the Fulton Fish Market in lower Manhattan and that Micthell’s book let her “revisit that world” and experience ”what came before me, and how my Seaport hometown connected to other parts of New York.”

“I have always loved characters and eccentrics and Mitchell’s portraits of people felt so vivid, I could almost draw them in my mind. Making this book felt like an extension of myself and all of my passions as an illustrator, a New Yorker, a kid from the Seaport!,” she continued.

“I am so thrilled Josh Safdie could contribute such a beautiful new introduction to this classic Mitchell collection,” she added. “I think Josh and I both have a reverence for secret or off-kilter worlds and the unusual people who animate them. Mitchell’s writing is lyrical and piercing, you feel internally calibrated after reading, you feel transported. I wanted to illustrate this book because I didn’t want to leave that place.”

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Their additions help breathe new life into Mitchell’s book, which “dives into the layers of history” surrounding the waterfront of New York Harbor, per a release.

The new edition of The Bottom of the Harbor will be released on May 12 and is available for preorder now, wherever books are sold.