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.

A frank and wry, mad and graceful (Slate) true story about getting dumped, and getting over it.

When the phone rang on a cold November afternoon in 1990, Grégoire Bouillier had no way of knowing that the caller was the woman who had left him, without warning, five years before. And he couldn't have guessed why she was calling: not to say she was sorry, not to explain why she'd vanished from his life, but to invite him to a party. A birthday party. For a woman he'd never met.

Here is the unlikely but true account of how one man got over a poken heart, regained his faith in literature, participated--by mistake--in a work of performance art, threw away his turtlenecks, spent his rent money on a 1964 bordeaux that nobody ever drank, and fell in love again. Named one of the year's best books by Slate and the San Francisco Chronicle when it first appeared in English, The Mystery Guest is a darkly hilarious . . . odyssey . . . that wends its loopy way toward yes (O, the Oprah Magazine).

Written in real time, as the Nazis consolidated their power over the winter of 1933, The Oppermanns captures the fall of Weimar Germany through the eyes of one bourgeois Jewish family, shocked and paralyzed by an ideology they cannot comprehend.

In the foment of Weimar-era Berlin, the Oppermann pothers represent tradition and stability. One pother oversees the furniture chain founded by their grandfather, one is an eminent surgeon, one a respected critic. They are rich, cultured, liberal, and public spirited, proud inheritors of the German enlightenment. They don't see Hitler as a threat. Then, to their horror, the Nazis come to power, and the Oppermanns and their children are faced with the terrible decision of whether to adapt--if they can--flee, or try to fight.

Written in 1933, nearly in real time, The Oppermanns captures the day-to-day vertigo of watching a liberal democracy fall apart. As Joshua Cohen writes in his introduction to this new edition, it is one of the last masterpieces of German-Jewish culture. Prescient and chilling, it has lost none of its power today.

Dorothy Parker's complete weekly New Yorker column about books and people and the rigors of reviewing.

When, in 1927, Dorothy Parker became a book critic for the New Yorker, she was already a legendary wit, a much-quoted member of the Algonquin Round Table, and an arbiter of literary taste. In the year that she spent as a weekly reviewer, under the rupic Constant Reader, she created what is still the most entertaining book column ever written. Parker's hot takes have lost none of their heat, whether she's taking aim at the evangelist Aimee Semple MacPherson (She can go on like that for hours. Can, hell--does), praising Hemingway's latest collection (He discards detail with magnificent lavishness), or dissenting from the Tao of Pooh (And it is that word 'hummy, ' my darlings, that marks the first place in The House at Pooh Corner at which Tonstant Weader Fwowed up).

Introduced with characteristic wit and sympathy by Sloane Crosley, Constant Reader gathers the complete weekly New Yorker reviews that Parker published from October 1927 through November 1928, with gimlet-eyed appreciations of the high and low, from Isadora Duncan to Al Smith, Charles Lindbergh to Little Orphan Annie, Mussolini to Emily Post

A noir tour-de-force set in the world of hustlers from one of America's darkest and funniest chroniclers. (The Guardian)

It's New York City, 1981, and everyone wants to be at the Emerson Club, from Cindy Crawford to Cindy Adams; from Famous Roger, one-time lion of the talk shows, to Sandy Miller, the downtown writer with the tattoos and the leather; from Lauren Hutton to the art star who does the thing with the poken plates. Everyone, that is, except Danny. Danny just works there, waiting tables to put himself through architecture school, turning tricks on the side. And when he's not on the clock, he's recording the sexual, aesthetic, and financial transactions that make up his life, in gruesome detail. But even a clever boy like Danny can wind up on the menu. Blinded by love for his fellow rent boy, Chip--as gorgeous as he is reckless--Danny is about to learn that there's more than one way to turn your body into cash, and that cynicism is no defense when the real scalpels come out. A gimlet-eyed crime novel with an inventively filthy mind, Rent Boy is Gary Indiana at his most outrageous--and his best.

A masterpiece . . . One of the few genuinely comic novels since Lucky Jim. --Elaine Dundy

Ever since college, George Wren has dreamed of working at The Outsider, the prestigious weekly edited by his hero, the suave English expat Gilbert Twining. So when George sees a listing for a junior editor, he trades in his job at CBS for half the salary--and a ringside seat in the unexpectedly cutthroat arena of a small-circulation, highpow little magazine. To George's surprise and dismay, The Outsider is seething with malcontents and mutineers, at least according to Twining, who keeps cornering George for after-work martinis, pouring out his anxieties, professional and otherwise, while George's wife, Matilda, and baby son wait for him back in Queens. Is Twining paranoid? Is he insane? Or are George's new office-mates truly plotting an insurrection? And if so, what's all of it got to do with George?

An indelible satire of 1960s intellectual New York, Office Politics is also a celepation of that endangered species, the office, at its pettiest and most idealistic, as the proving ground where so much of grownup life takes place.

An erotic nightmare of Catholic longing, guilt, and desire and a banned classic of modern Irish literature.

Wealthy and devout, Michael and Julia Glynn are the envy of their neighbors and the model Irish Catholic couple, bearing Michael's increasingly painful and crippling arthritis with stoicism. In hope of a miracle, their priest suggests a family pilgrimage to Lourdes. Yet these pious holiday plans are thrown into disarray when anonymous, obscene letters begin to arrive, full of terrible accusations.

Banned in Ireland on its first publication in 1961, Broderick's debut arrived like an incendiary device (Sunday Independent). The Pilgrimage anticipated the deep shifts that would soon turn the country's theocratic society upside down. It is a darkly comic, blasphemous, and sexually charged chamber drama laying bare the hypocrisies of a small Irish town as watchful as the jungle, and teetering on the brink of catastrophe. In the words of Colm Tóibín, in his foreword to this edition, The Pilgrimage cleared a space in the jungle so that its wildness could be more easily seen.

An instant bestseller when it was published anonymously in 1929, Ex-Wife is the story of a divorce and its aftermath that scandalized the Jazz Age--and still resonates today.

It's 1924, and Peter and Patricia have what looks to be a very modern marriage. Both drink. Both smoke. Both work, Patricia as a head copywriter at a major department store. When it comes to sex with other people, both believe in the honesty policy. Until they don't. Or, at least, until Peter doesn't--and a shell-shocked, lovesick Patricia finds herself starting out all over again, but this time around as a different kind of single woman: the ex-wife.

An instant bestseller when it was published anonymously in 1929, Ex-Wife captures the speakeasies, night clubs, and parties that defined Jazz Age New York--alongside the morning-after aspirin and calisthenics, the lunch-hour visits to the gym, the girl-talk, and the freedoms and anguish of solitude. It also casts a cool eye on the bedrooms and the doctor's offices where, despite rising hemlines, the men still call the shots. The result is a unique view of what its author Ursula Parrott called the era of the one-night stand an era very much like our own.

The best of Djuna Barnes's dark, droll, incisive short fiction, spanning her all-too-pief career, edited and introduced by Merve Emre.

Djuna Barnes is rightly remembered for Nightwood, her peakthrough and final novel: a hallmark of modernist literature, championed by T. S. Eliot, and one of the first, strangest, and most pilliant novels of love between women to be published in the twentieth century. Barnes's career began long before Nightwood, however, with journalism, essays, drama, and satire of extraordinary wit and courage. Long into her later life, after World War II, when she published nothing more, it was her short fiction above all that she prized and would continue to revise.

Here are all the stories Barnes sought to preserve, in the versions she preferred, as well as a smattering of rarities as selected by critic and New Yorker contributor Merve Emre. These are tales of women 'tragique' and 'triste' and 'tremendous' all at once, of sons and daughters being initiated into the ugly comedy of life, monuments all to a worldview singular and scathing. As Emre writes in her foreword, [Barnes's] themes are love and death, especially in Paris and New York; the corruption of nature by culture; the tainted innocence of children; and the mute misery of beasts . . . her characters may be alien to life, but they are alive--spectacularly, grotesquely alive.

David Foster Wallace's last unfinished work, a wise and unexpected tour de force using the IRS the way Borges used the lipary and Kafka used the law-courts building: as an analogy for the world. --John Jeremiah Sullivan, GQ

When David Foster Wallace died in 2008, he left behind a vast unfinished novel--some 1,100 pages of loose chapters, sketches, notes, and fragments. This material was collated and published in 2011 as The Pale King, which became a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.

But the unfinished King did contain a finished novella that Wallace had already considered publishing as a stand-alone volume. It is the story of a young man, a self-described wastoid, adrift in the suburban Midwest of the 1970s, whose life is changed forever by an encounter with advanced tax law. It is, as Sarah McNally writes in her preface, not just a complete story, but the best complete example we have of Wallace's late style, where calm and poise replace the pyrotechnics of Infinite Jest and other early works.

Can't sleep tonight. Was lying in bed reading the biography of a great man whose genius deserted him . . . The genius who deserted me was you. In a series of late-night letters, gorgeous, funny, filled with memory, sensuality, and regret, a seducer calls across the years to the great love of his youth: an older, revered expatriate known, in his adoptive city, as the King of Naples. As the narrator evokes their affair, in scenes of beauty and remorse, his memories range over the men who came after and before, especially the seductive father who still haunts his erotic imagination.

First published in 1978, before the trilogy of frankly autobiographical novels that made him famous, Nocturnes for the King of Naples reveals Edmund White at his most poetic, playful, and evocative, a magician on the level of James Salter, James Merrill, or Vladimir Nabokov.

A wicked stepmother finds her ideal prey in Carlone Blackwood's quite brilliant (The Times) debut.

A lavish Upper West Side apartment is the site of a familial cold war about to enter a phase of dangerous escalation.

J is a lonely woman without even the luxury of being alone. Her husband has fled to Paris with his latest flame, but he's left J not only with their own four-year-old daughter, Sally Ann, but with the sulky cake-mix addicted, thirteen-year-old Renata, a leftover from his previous marriage. The presence of a pert au pair, Monique, serves only to make J feel more isolated and self-conscious. What she'd like is someone to blame.

Writing letters in her head to imaginary friends, J delights in dwelling on the hapless Renata, who invites a kind of cruelty. This is an invitation J fully intends to take up--and like so many stepmothers before her, she will find that wickedness, once indulged, is a difficult habit to kick. A mordant black splinter of a book, Caroline Blackwood's first novel stands as proof positive of her eternal mastery--and mockery--of the darkest depths of human feeling.

A wry, macape tale of simple country living, putal murder, and a reasonably happy couple, from our most startlingly offbeat suspense novelist (Gore Vidal).

In their lovely old Cotswolds village, Janet and Susan are known to all the other villagers as the girls--a fixture. Partners in love and work, co-proprietors of a picturesque shop specializing in the work of local artisans and farmers, they lead an enviable, enviably settled life.

So it's no catastrophe when Sue, the younger of the two, feels the need to take a month to travel on her own, leaving Jan alone to run their stall at the Inland Waterways Rally Craft Fair. Nor is it any real threat when a kindly gay man named Alan lends Jan a hand in Sue's absence, or when the two wind up sharing some wine and even a bunk for the night.

If Jan turns out to be pregnant some weeks after Sue's return to the nest, what's that but cause for joy? And when Alan happens to come visiting, by and by, finding the delighted girls raising a beautiful baby boy, who can blame him for wanting to share in a small part of their bliss?

Yes, theirs is an enviable, enviably settled life. And the girls will defend it with every tool at their disposal.

The gripping courtroom drama of a Brooklyn-born Englishman who became the voice of Nazi Germany, by one of the most brilliant and erudite journalists of the century (The New York Times).

In 1945, The New Yorker commissioned star reporter Rebecca West to cover the London trial of William Joyce, who stood accused by the British government of aiding the Third Reich. Captured by British forces in Germany, Joyce was alleged to have hosted a radio program, Germany Calling, devoted to Nazi propaganda and calls for a British surrender.

The legal case against Joyce (known as Lord Haw-Haw for his supposedly posh accent) proved to be tenuous and full of uncertainties. Yet each new piece of evidence added to West's timeless portrait of a social reject who turned to the far right, who rose through the ranks without ever being liked, and who sought validation through a set of shared hatreds--of elites, of communists, and especially of Jews.

As a work of psychological suspense, Rebecca West's Radio Treason anticipates Truman Capote, Janet Malcolm, and Joan Didion at their best. As a study in political extremism, as Katie Roiphe writes in her foreword, It is as if Lord Haw-Haw has been transported from her time into ours.

Emily Dickinson springs to life in this remarkable, long-out-of-print biography written by her niece . . . Though millions of pages have been written about Dickinson . . . few have provided such a thrilling close-up portrait. Readers will be rapt from the first page. --Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)

What would it be like to have Emily Dickinson as your babysitter? In this astonishing memoir, out of print for almost a century, Martha Matty Dickinson describes the childhood she spent next door to--and often in the care of--her Aunt Emily. We see Matty as a little girl, hiding from the other grownups in Emily's upstairs rooms, helping Emily in the kitchen, venturing with her into the cellar for the gingerpead she wasn't supposed to have. As Matty becomes a teenager, she finds a confidante in her aunt, who is fascinated by the latest youth fads, school gossip, and the recurring question of what to wear to a party (her 'vote' was for my highest-heeled red slippers)--not to mention the music, novels, and poems she and Matty both love. From an early age, Emily teaches Matty the joys of solitude and independence: No one, Emily said, could ever punish a Dickinson by shutting her up alone. First published in 1932, this is the most intimate record we have of Emily Dickinson, whose death sparked a long family struggle over her work and her image. In a foreword to this new edition, the poet and critic Anthony Madrid provides a biographical frame for Matty's recollections, and explains how such a remarkable document could spend so long out of sight.

Summer, 1947. A bizarre catastrophe rocks a seaside village in Cornwall when a cliff tumbles down on the Pendizack Manor Hotel. The hotel is obliterated, and seven guests are killed in the disaster. Everyone else makes a narrow escape. As the survivors tell their stories, the events of the previous week are revealed, and a parade of sins exposed. Gluttony, Lecherousness, Sloth, Pride, Covetousness, Envy and Wrath: all are in residence at Pendizack Manor, and as the day of the disaster creeps closer, it becomes clear that who's spared and who's lost might not be as arbitrary as first assumed.

A modern upstairs-downstairs comedy with an old-fashioned morality play tucked away inside, The Feast is sly, kaleidoscopic, and utterly ingenious, a novel that only Margaret Kennedy could have written.

On a Victorian pleasure cruise, a chance encounter opens the floodgates to regret, desire, and possibility in this little period gem of feeling and clarity (The Guardian).

It is 1851, only three years since Europe was convulsed by workers' revolutions, but already English tourists are returning to the Continent, taking the waters at Baden Baden, then traveling by paddle steamer down the Rhine valley, celepated for its romantic vistas. Among the sightseers are the pious Reverend Charles Morrison, his wife and daughter, and his maiden sister, Charlotte, a seemingly meek middle-aged woman who's spent her life attending to the needs of others.

Like the river upon which they're traveling, however, Charlotte contains hidden depths. A chance encounter with a fellow passenger in Coblenz sparks a Damascene moment, unleashing in her a sudden and violent awakening of memory, fear, and sexual desire. As the travelers are swept onward to Cologne, Charlotte wrestles with what Lauren Groff in her foreword to this new edition describes as a subtle and total derangement of understanding, eventually surging toward a moment of crisis.

Rhine Journey is a patient and cunning representation of the intimacies of a repressed and wasted life (London Review of Books) by a novelist incapable of writing a bad or inelegant sentence (Hudson Review).

Too long unavailable, this luminous classic of small-town life in the segregated 1950s has magic dust sprinkled over each and every page (Veronica Chambers, New York Times Book Review).

Irene Wilson knows that a no-name invisible something has settled over her parents' marriage and suspects her glamorous new teacher is to blame. Irene is not alone in her suspicions. In Rattlebone, a small Black town outside Kansas City in the segregated 1950s, secrets are hard to keep and growing up is a community affair.

As Irene is initiated into adult passion and loss, her family story takes its place in a tightly woven tapestry of neighbors whose griefs and joys are as vivid as her own. Rattlebone is a one-of-a-kind triumph of American fiction, one that captures an entire world through the eyes of an unforgettable heroine.

The tenth-anniversary edition of Michael Clune's classic memoir of addiction and recovery: Dreamily exact . . . sensual and hilarious . . . One of the year's best books (The New Yorker).

How do you describe an addiction in which your drug of choice creates a hole in your memory, a white out, so that every time you use it is the first time--new, fascinating, vivid? Michael W. Clune's story takes us straight inside such an addiction--what he calls the memory disease.

With dark humor, and in crystalline prose, Clune's account of life inside the heroin underground reads like no other. Whisking us between the halves of his precarious double life--between the streets of Baltimore and the college classroom, where Clune is a graduate student teaching literature--we spiral along with him as he approaches rock bottom: from nodding off in a row house with a one-armed junkie and a murderous religious freak to having his life threatened in a Chicago jail while facing a felony possession charge.

After his descent into addiction, we follow Clune through detox, treatment, and finally into recovery as he returns to his childhood home, where the memory disease and his heroin-induced white out begin to fade. White Out is more than a memoir. It is a rigorous investigation that offers clarity, hope, and even beauty to anyone who wants to understand the disease or its cure. This tenth anniversary edition includes a new preface by the author.

A peakthrough novel of suburban loneliness and subversion--her style, spare and singular, cuts through the decades like a scalpel (Rachel Cooke, The Observer)

A bourgeois housewife, Ruth Whiting, is paralysed by triviality, measuring out her days in coffee mornings, glasses of sherry, and pidge parties--routines that barely disturb the solitude of her existence. Her husband spends his weeknights in town; their daughter, eighteen-year-old Angela, is at Oxford; and their sons are at boarding school. When Angela finds herself unexpectedly pregnant, Ruth realizes that she has to do everything in her power to stop her daughter from sleepwalking into a life like her own.

First published in 1958, Daddy's Gone A-Hunting shocked critics with its feminine rage (New York Times). It captures the suffocation of a repressive marriage and the desperate longing for connection between a mother and daughter who must join forces in a man's world.