Perhaps no one has captured the city as lyrically, and certainly none as efficiently, as E.B. White. This brief essay (it was originally a 7500-word piece for Holiday magazine, and is easily read in an hour) was written in a hot hotel room over a 2-day period in the summer of 1948. The famous opening line ("On anyone who desires such queer prizes, New York will bestow the gift of loneliness and the gift of privacy.") sets the stage for a portrait of the city that moves from Broadway to Central Park, from the horn of the great steamships to the dark of the bars on 3rd Avenue. Though, as Roger Angell points out in the introduction to the new edition, so much of what he mentions is no longer here (the hotel cafe he hung out in was gone even by the time the piece was first published in 1949), the prose has an amazingly timeless, fresh quality to it, and is a marvelous introduction to what people still love about New York City.  (NYC28, $16.95)