E. B. White's greatest stories, asides, essays, jokes, and tall tales about the city he arguably saw clearest, loved best, and skewered most mercilessly. Over more than fifty years at the New Yorker , E. B. White came to define a kind of ideal American prose: clear, casual, democratic, and urbane. He also did more than any writer to define his favorite city. His classic Here Is New York captured a moment in the life of Manhattan with precision and love--but his was no fleeting infatuation.

In New York Sketches , the first collection of his casual pieces about the city, White ranges at whim from the nesting habits of pigeons to the aisles of a calculator trade-show on Eighth Avenue, from the behavior of snails in aquariums to the ghosts of old romance that haunt a flower shop or a fire escape or an old hotel. 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 playful and inventive. New York Sketches is a welcome diversion for every New Yorker--native, adoptive, or far from home--and a perfect introduction, not only to what White called "the inscrutable and lovely town," but to the everyday enchantments of one of her fondest reporters.