Up in the Old Hotel
by Joseph Mitchell | 
Reporting at Wit's End
by St. Clair McKelway | 
The Colossus of New York
by Colson Whitehead |
The Long-Winded Lady
by Maeve Brennan | 
The Great Movies
by Roger Ebert | 
A Slip of the Keyboard
by Terry Pratchett | 
Reflections
by Diana Wynne Jones | 
The Art of the Novel
by Milan Kundera |
Awake in the Dark
by Roger Ebert | 
The Cross of Redemption
by James Baldwin | 
The Faraway Nearby
by Rebecca Solnit | 
The Journey Home
by Edward Abbey | 
The Other Glass Teat
by Harlan Ellison | 
Sleepless Nights in the Procrustean Bed: Essays
by Harlan Ellison |
Just Enough Liebling
by A. J. Liebling | 
The Adding Machine
by William S. Burroughs | 
The Devil Finds Work
by James Baldwin | 
The Essays of Leonard Michaels
by Leonard Michaels | 
Inner Workings
by J. M. Coetzee | 
What Makes This Book So Great
by Jo Walton |
As a young newspaper reporter in 1930s New York, Joseph Mitchell interviewed fan dancers, street evangelists, voodoo conjurers, not to mention a lady boxer who also happened to be a countess. Mitchell haunted parts of the city now vanished: the fish market, burlesque houses, tenement neighborhoods, and storefront churches. Whether he wrote about a singing first baseman for the Brooklyn Dodgers or a nudist who does a reverse striptease, Mitchell brilliantly illuminated the humanity in the oddest New Yorkers. These pieces, written primarily for The World-Telegram and The Herald Tribune, highlight his abundant gifts of empathy and observation, and give us the full-bodied picture of the famed New Yorker writer Mitchell would become. From the Trade Paperback edition.