New York Sketches

“Jewels of observation . . . A world described in such loving detail overflows with wonders: The rigorous attention in Sketches is a kind of re-enchantment.” —Becca Rothfeld, The Washington Post

Now in a beautiful hardcover gift edition: E. B. White’s wisest and wittiest homages to his beloved, bedeviled, beguiling New York City.

For more than fifty years at The New Yorker, E. B. White came to define the ideal American prose: clear, casual, democratic, and urbane. While his classic Here Is New York captured a specific moment in the life of Manhattan, New York Sketches, the first collection of his casual pieces about the city, offers a more intimate and playful look at the city’s everyday enchantments.

Here White ranges at whim from the nesting habits of pigeons to the behavior of snails in aquariums, from the ghosts of old romance that haunt a fire escape or flower shop to the bustle of a calculator trade show on Eighth Avenue. These sketches, some less than a page long, many written for a laugh or in response to the news of the day, show us White at his most sprightly and inventive.

Newly presented in a beautiful, pocket-sized hardcover gift edition, New York Sketches is a diversion for every New Yorker—native, adoptive, aspiring, or far from home—and a perfect introduction to what White called “the inscrutable and lovely town.”

Inhalt:

Foreword by Martha White

MANNERS

Notes & Comment: July 16, 1932

Defense of the Bronx River

Notes & Comment: February 18, 1928

Notes & Comment: November 29, 1952

Definitions

Notes & Comment: July 3, 1954

Notes & Comment: March 24, 1945

Window Box

Notes & Comment: December 4, 1948

Notes & Comment: July 17, 1954

Notes & Comment: November 5, 1949

Notes & Comment: November 29, 1952

Notes & Comment: July 3, 1937

Notes & Comment: February 19, 1943

The Rock Dove

Notes & Comment: May 11, 1935

Lines in Anguish

Daisy at One Fifth Ave

Daisy at Schrafft's

Interview with Daisy

Notes & Comment: October 6, 1923

The Gastropods

The Wings of Orville

Reading Room

Notes & Comment: January 16, 1937

Notes & Comment: January 6, 1951

The Lady Is Cold

MEMORIES & INVENTIONS

Obituary

Business Show

The Hour of Letdown

The Street of the Dead

The Retort Transcendental

Child's Play

Journeys

The Hotel of the Total Stranger

Goodbye to 48th Street

Gramercy Park

Getting Away

Notes & Comment: June 11, 1955