Robert Drewe gathers short fiction about urban life from a genuinely broad international field: Don DeLillo, Joan Didion, Banana Yoshimoto, Naguib Mahfouz, Gabriel García Márquez, Junot Díaz, Donald Barthelme, John Cheever, Peter Carey, Salman Rushdie, Will Self, Irvine Welsh, Maeve Binchy, Joyce Carol Oates and plenty more.

Published in 1997, the collection treats the city as a machine for producing particular kinds of experience: anonymity, collision, loneliness, surveillance, chance encounters, migration, class, sex, work, violence and strange forms of intimacy between people who may never see one another again. Drewe’s selection moves between New York, Los Angeles, Cairo, Tokyo and other urban worlds without trying to manufacture a single theory of metropolitan life. Instead, the city keeps changing according to whoever is moving through it.

There are some extremely good pairings here: Banana Yoshimoto’s drifting, quietly uncanny “Newlywed”; Junot Díaz’s “How to Date a Brown Girl”; Didion on L.A.; Barthelme doing Barthelme; Mahfouz, Márquez, DeLillo and Cheever all compressed into the same strange municipal ecosystem. A very solid reader for anyone interested in the city as literary form rather than merely geography.

Edition & condition: Penguin Books Australia, 1997. First edition. Paperback. Moderate shelf wear with some age-toning and scattered foxing; binding sound and pages clean overall. Good condition.