Two Timeless Tributes to New York
E. B. White’s New York Sketches and Cafe Gitane: 30 Years beautifully encapsulate the soul of the city
Dear readers,
In 1955, E. B. White wrote, “The two moments when New York seems most desirable, when the splendor falls all round about and the city looks like a girl with leaves in her hair, are just as you are leaving and must say goodbye and just as you return and can say hello.” New York is a city of arrivals and departures, constantly changing yet eternally, vibrantly itself. This holiday season we’re delighted to honor the city that McNally Editions calls home with two new books: E. B. White’s New York Sketches and Isobel Lola Brown’s Cafe Gitane: 30 Years.
New York Sketches, a new collection of E.B. White’s musings about New York City, offers two pleasures, one nostalgic and one stylistic: There is the invocation of the New York of the 1930s and ’40s, a glamorous jumble of fast-talking journalists and smoky saloons, and there is the wry poetry of the writing... Jewels of observation that glint on every page of Sketches... A world described in such loving detail overflows with wonders: The rigorous attention in “Sketches” is a kind of re-enchantment.
—Becca Rothfeld, The Washington Post
Over more than fifty years at The New Yorker and through his classic Here Is New York, E. B. White did more than any writer to define the city. The short pieces in New York Sketches range 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. It’s a book for every New Yorker—native, adoptive, aspiring, or far from home.
A vanguard of cool, back on the scene again... Thirty years later, and with a new book honoring it, Cafe Gitane is drawing a fresh crowd... The book features interviews with glitzy regulars like Norman Reedus, Serge Becker and Inez van Lamsweerde... There’s a recipe for the restaurant’s avocado toast (widely said to be the first served in New York City), an ode to the little green dress worn by Gitane waitresses and... tales about how Cat Power was the cafe’s first server, how David Bowie loved the couscous so much he would have it delivered to his apartment and how Albert Hammond Jr. of the Strokes wooed a waitress he went on to marry.
—Alex Vadukul, The New York Times
NoLIta’s iconic Cafe Gitane opened on Mott Street in 1994, before the neighborhood North of Little Italy even had its own portmanteau. Soon, Luc Lévy’s colorful French Moroccan hangout became the hub of a vibrant downtown New York culture of artists, creatives, and luminaries, around the corner from our flagship McNally Jackson bookstore. Now, we’re thrilled to be collaborating on a very special project: Cafe Gitane: 30 Years, by Isobel Lola Brown—a stunning, limited-edition coffee table book that captures three decades of cultural history, recipes, and gorgeous photography by Melanie Dunea.
In a fabric slipcase edition with only 1,000 copies printed, Cafe Gitane: 30 Years is available exclusively at McNally Jackson.
Impossibly cool anecdotes... fill the pages of [this] 30th anniversary coffee table book... It features interviews and stories with actors and screenwriters, fashionistas and parish priests, forming a time capsule of an analog ‘90s New York, where a rockstar regular might end up marrying a cafe waitress.
—Ryan Kailath, Gothamist