Let’s talk more about all that as we discuss your five books, starting with The Portable Dorothy Parker. Please introduce Parker to readers that haven’t had the pleasure – we have an international audience.

Lack of knowledge about Dorothy Parker is not confined to the international audience. She is no longer well known here either. Dorothy Parker wrote many kinds of things – short stories, book reviews and poetry. Not the kind of poetry people think of, not John Donne – she wrote light-hearted poems, she wrote theatre reviews, she wrote for The New Yorker. She was most known for being part of a group that was called the Algonquin Round Table – a group of writers that hung around the Algonquin Hotel who were known for being very witty. The reason they were known was that there was a newspaper columnist among them, FPA [Franklin P Adams], who chronicled their witticisms, almost daily.

People should still read Parker because she is really funny. When you read the book reviews she wrote 60 years ago, you still laugh out loud, even if you don’t know the book. Of course in that era, in every era really, people who were funny were taken less seriously. This was the era of Hemingway – she was not Hemingway. I prefer her, but that is a minority opinion.

The people that gathered at the Algonquin Round Table in the 1920s, beside Parker, also called themselves “the Vicious Circle”. Do you need to have bite to get ahead in New York?

It depends what you mean by getting ahead. When people talk about getting ahead, they tend to mean getting rich. You don’t have to be witty to get rich – wit is something that would probably only hamper you. Being witty doesn’t get you far anywhere any more. It’s not very valued.

On to another woman who was well known at the Algonquin, but perhaps less well known outside her coterie of fans, who included Hemingway. Tell us about Dawn Powell and her diaries.

Dawn Powell was completely unknown to me until the late 1980s, when Gore Vidal – who knew her when she was old and he was young – wrote an essay about her for The New York Review of Books. Then a tiny, tiny press started republishing her.

There is no other writer I could recommend more heartily than her. If you had asked me to choose New York novels, I would have had a very rough time choosing among hers. They are spectacularly good. She wrote two sets of books. One whole group of her novels is set in Ohio, where she’s from – they are also excellent. But the New York ones are funnier, they’re basically satires. You should read Dawn Powell’s novels and then read her diaries, or vice versa, it doesn’t really matter. But when you read her diaries you see what it really means to be a writer. She struggled her whole life for money. She’s constantly worrying about money, because she doesn’t have any. This is the condition of most writers. You could read the letters of James Joyce and you’d see this. And I can’t stress enough how good she was. It teaches a little lesson: You can be sensational and not succeed financially. In fact, you’re more likely not to succeed financially if you’re really good.

The diaries are immensely rich – they give you a great picture of a certain sensibility and a certain part of New York.

And what can we learn about the social swirl that makes New York great from reading Powell and Parker?

Powell overlaps in era with Dorothy Parker, but there is a difference in their sensibilities. Powell was more bohemian than Parker. She lived in the Village her entire New York life. Dorothy Parker was very connected to The New Yorker, which was in Midtown. Those writers were generally more successful financially. Dorothy Parker was depressed by nature. Dawn Powell tended towards optimism, even though she had a much worse life – a child who was severely autistic and plenty of problems with her husband. A way in which they were similar was there was an endless, unbelievable, shocking amount of drinking.

As I said, they’re basically of the same era. If you read both of these books you’ll see that New York was at one time a million cities at once because there are so many different sensibilities at work.

Urban economist Ed Glaeser told me that cities should be credited for humanity’s greatest hits – from Athenian philosophy through Facebook – because cities enable us to casually exchange ideas, information and inspiration. Do you second this opinion?

I certainly second that opinion. Density creates that dynamic. You don’t get that in Los Angeles, I don’t care who claims it. I don’t care how many rich people build museums in LA. To me, it’s not a city if people spend half their day in a car.

Has Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s smoking ban cut down on the kind of casual exchanges that help New York happen?

I said directly to Michael Bloomberg, “You know what sitting around in bars and restaurants, talking and smoking and drinking, is called, Mike?” He said, “What?” I said, “It’s called the history of art.”