For the past few weeks as I've navigated Toronto, a thin paperback has served as a constant travelling companion. Ten Walks/Two Talks is a recent book by Jon Cotner and Andy Fitch that might best be described as a New York City travel diary. However, Cotner and Fitch are hardly tourists and the urban landscape they traverse is a rich sensorium of ephemeral observations, lingering memories and in-the-moment lived experience. The book is loosely organized as a series of walks that vaguely reference various seasons, events and neighbourhoods but reads as a continuous montage of acute observations and charming half-formed thoughts. A brief excerpt:

Mott Street's charming vertical signs mitigated my return to weird air-pressure. I swerved onto Aldritch past a long austere post office. A stylist dried salon windows with just an index card. A bike lay curled and melted. I could hear my heart beat for about a block. Then I was back on Bowery: watching pairs of women sift through rhinestones.

Reviewer Lynne Tillman describes Cotner and Fitch as either "21st century dandies or rootless homeboys" and I think this assessment is bang-on. Ten Walks/Two Talks is charged with a listless sense of wonder where 'the city' is constantly reconstructed—one percept at a time—as both a magical and completely unremarkable place. When the duo aren't walking, they are deep in conversation and the transcripts of two discussions offers additional perspective on meandering as a way of being.

This book is essential reading for urban romantics, if only to bask in the peculiarity of "tenth floor altitude" and a hundred other similar marvels of prose. I have to thank the authors for these tiny insights that are perhaps best described in their own words as "maniacal grace."