Here is New York

"Because I’m a writer, I think this is a very important city for writers—and because I work at the New Yorker , I think it’s a very important city for certain kinds of writers. This book was part of a travel series, for which they had reporters and editors try to corral writers and have them talk about their travel. They might take Paul Bowles to northern Africa, for instance, and he’d guide them around. They wanted E B White to take part, but he didn’t really want to travel; he normally stayed pretty close to home. So he came into the city from Maine and walked around a little, and thought about what he had experienced here when he was younger. It’s a great snapshot of how the city changes slightly over time, and I guess that’s why people say it’s a letter—because he’s revisiting it. It’s not formally a letter, of course, but White is coming back to New York, and he’s grappling with his own memories. In my book, I say a lot of letters are about longing and missing things, and that’s certainly the case here, in that White is having these memories and trying to square them with how things have changed. It’s a very clear and interesting and multi-generational picture of the city through a certain kind of lens—through the eyes of a certain kind of writer. It’s obviously not reflective of everybody’s experience, but this kind of experience is very sharply focused, and very well drawn. White was writing post-war, and after he walked around he holed up in a hotel room and said, let me remember to myself what I experienced here. It’s a strange travel book because, in a way, it’s sort of the opposite of a travel book. Most travel books are all about newness; this is a revisit instead of a visit."