Top ten books about New York

Craig Taylor is the author, most recently, of New Yorkers: A City and Its People in Our Time.

His other books include Londoners: The Days and Nights of London Now—As Told by Those Who Love It, Hate It, Live It, Left It, and Long for It, Return to Akenfield, and One Million Tiny Plays About Britain, which began life as a column in the Guardian newspaper.

At the Guardian Taylor tagged ten of his favorite books about New York. One title on the list:

The Long-winded Lady by Maeve Brennan

No one captures the small moments of New York like Maeve Brennan. I remember a woman at City Diner, 90th and Broadway, who’d appear most evenings with a fat Russian novel and a glass of diner white wine. Maeve Brennan would have written up her story in prose that would at first appear wispy before revealing its weight. Brennan performs exactly this feat in the 47 short pieces here, all of which appeared in the New Yorker between 1954 and 1981. They are slight only on first read.

Read about another entry on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue