Books by E. B. White

A delightful, witty, spirited collection of short pieces and essays by the inimitable E. B. White.

William Shawn once called The Talk of the Town the soul of the magazine. The section began in the first issue, in 1925. But it wasn''t until a couple of years later, when E. B. White and James Thurber arrived, that the Talk of the Town story became what it is today: a precise piece of journalism that always gets the story and has a little fun along the way.The Fun of It is the first anthology of Talk pieces that spans the magazine''s life. Edited by Lillian Ross, the longtime Talk reporter and New Yorker staff writer, the book brings together pieces by the section''s most original writers. Only in a collection of Talk stories will you find E. B. White visiting a potter''s field; James Thurber following Gertrude Stein at Brentano''s; Geoffrey Hellman with Cole Porter at the Waldorf Towers; A. J. Liebling on a book tour with Albert Camus; Maeve Brennan ventriloquizing the long-winded lady; John Updike navigating the passageways of midtown; Calvin Trillin marching on Washington in 1963; Jacqueline Onassis chatting with Cornell Capa; Ian Frazier at the Monster Truck and Mud Bog Fall Nationals; John McPhee in virgin forest; Mark Singer with sixth-graders adopting Hudson River striped bass; Adam Gopnik in Flatbush visiting the ìgrandest theatre devoted exclusively to the movies; Hendrik Hertzberg pinning down a Sulzberger on how the Times got colorized; George Plimpton on the tennis court with Boris Yeltsin; and Lillian Ross reporting good little stories for more than forty-five years. They and dozens of other Talk contributors provide an entertaining tour of the most famous section of the most famous magazine in the world.

Unlike other cygnets, Louis, the trumpeter swan, cannot utter a sound. But with the encouragement of his father, Louis sets out to overcome his problem. One way of doing this Louis decides, is to learn to read and write and so he sets off to Montana to find his friend Sam Beaver.

Stuart Little is no ordinary mouse. Born to a family of humans he lives in New York City with his parents, his older brother George and Snowball the cat. He's an adventurous and heroic little mouse. When his best friend, a beautiful little bird called Margalo disappears from her nest, Stuart is determined to track her down.

Fern loves a little pig called Wilbur. Charlotte A Cavatica, a beautiful grey spider, saves Wilbur from the usual fate of nice fat pigs, by a wonderfully clever plan - a plan so original that no one else could possibly have thought of it.

This distillation of the wit, style, and humanity of E. B. White offers readers a delightful selection of quotations, selected and annotated by E. B. White's granddaughter and literary executor, Martha White.