Simon Winchester's book about Calcutta is actually titled Simon Winchester's Calcutta ($20.95), such is Winchester's reputation as a travel writer and historian of the bizarre. This is an anthology of excerpts, part of a new Lonely Planet series set up to compete with the popular Travelers' Tales one (to which Winchester also contributes). The pieces chosen are mostly by names you would expect to see: Rudyard Kipling, Paul Theroux, V. S. Naipaul, Rabindranath Tagore, and Winchester's onetime mentor, Jan Morris, surely the least substantial of today's famous travel writers. Winchester also includes a section from Days and Nights in Calcutta by the husband-and-wife team of former Canadians Clark Blaise and Bharati Mukherjee. But the most richly textured and informative piece is Winchester's own introductory essay, for he writes, reports, remembers, and thinks rings round most of the others.

Other new travel books that try to capture the essence of individual cities include Fleeting Rome: In Search of la Dolce Vita by Carlo Levi (John Wiley & Sons, $31.99) and Rio de Janeiro: Carnival Under Fire by Ruy Castro (Bloomsbury, $24.95). Levi, now dead, was a beloved Italian author, artist, and politician, considered a national treasure of sorts, like a combination of, say, Jean Cocteau and André Malraux in France. As might be expected from such a polymath, Fleeting Rome, translated by Tony Shugaar, is as much memoir and criticism as descriptive travel writing, being concerned with Rome from the end of the Second World War to the mid-1960s. But it also achieves the kind of impressionistic truth about a place that comes only from the correct combination of intimacy and distance, attraction and distaste.

If Rome has an equivalent in the Americas, it's got to be Rio, another place where people live in the moment but a city whose most storied ingredients--flamboyant crime, good times, easy money, worldly pleasures, and the splendours of the past--are at once both traditions and agents of constant change. Castro is a local journalist, media figure, and all-round Rio booster. But his book, translated by John Gledson, is more serious than the author's bio would lead one to expect.

Pete Hamill, a journalist I've almost always read with pleasure, holds the distinction of having been the editor of two of New York City's three daily newspapers (the two that aren't the New York Times). His career, in fact, has had a splendid 19th-century-style miscellaneousness about it, what with screenplays, a couple of biographies (Diego Rivera and Frank Sinatra!), 10 not especially memorable novels, a collection of short stories set in Tokyo--in short, all manner of things and all the more remarkable for someone suffering from alcoholism, the subject of 1993's A Drinking Life, which was his most recent book until Downtown: My Manhattan (Penguin Canada, $34.95).

Downtown is in the recognizable tradition of all those Baghdad-on-the-Hudson books about New York and its multiplicity (one might almost say superfluity) of facets, the sort associated with moonlighting columnists, New Yorker staff writers, and the very young Gay Talese. That being said, Hamill understands the subgenre and works well in it. This isn't literature, exactly, not even in the sense of creative nonfiction, but neither is it reheated reporting. It's what an acquaintance of mine calls the Higher Journalism.