New York is the archetypal vertical city  a place that "half the world feels it knows, even if it hasn't been there", as Reyes says in this excellent addition to the city-pick series of urban anthologies. So much has been written about the world's first megacity that a book 10 times the size of this modest volume would scarcely scratch the surface. But with more than 150 excerpts from fiction and non-fiction Reyes succeeds in capturing the authentic flavour of the Big Apple: its unforgettable skyline, "the greatest sight in the world" (John Dos Passos); its wealth and poverty  Dickens found "all that is loathsome, drooping, and decayed" in its slums; the tragedy of 9/11; the "wild and marvellous" (Jan Morris) atmosphere of Greenwich Village in its heyday; the jazz clubs of Harlem; the bright lights of Times Square; and what Walt Whitman termed the city's "exuberant arrogance". Love it or hate it (John Updike said "it makes you glad you live somewhere else"), New York is undoubtedly, as EL Doctorow says, "the most spectacular phenomenon in the unnatural world".