Wonderful Town: New York Stories from The New Yorker [Paperback]

New York City is not onlyThe New Yorker's place of origin and its sensibility's lifeblood; it is the heart of American literary culture.Wonderful Towncollects superb short fiction by many of the magazine's and this country's most accomplished writers. Like all good fiction, these stories take particular places, particular people, and particular events and turn them into dramas of universal enlightenment and emotional impact. Here New York is every great place and every ordinary place. Each life in it, and each life inWonderful Town, is the life of us all."Wonderfully rich and textured."
--The Philadelphia Inquirer

"An anthology that makes] you remember why the magazine has long had a reputation for literary excellence."
--Chicago Tribune

"Smart, well-written, and emotionally resonant, while possessing a high entertainment value."
--The Plain Dealer(Cleveland)David Remnick is the editor ofThe New Yorker. He won the Pulitzer Prize in 1994 forLenin's Tomband is also the author ofResurrection and King of the World: Muhammad Ali and the Rise of an American Hero. He lives in New York City with his wife and three children.
From the moment Harold Ross published the first issue of The New Yorker, seventy-five years ago (cover price: fifteen cents), the magazine has been a thing of its place, a magazine of the city. And yet the first issue is a curiosity, a thin slice of the city's life, considering all that came after. Dated February 21, 1925, it offers only a hint of the boldness and depth to come, just a whisper of the range of response to its place of origin. What was certainly there from the start, however, was a determinedly sophisticated lightness, a silvery urbane tone of the pre-Crash era that was true to its moment (in some neighborhoods) and which also became the magazine's signature.

Of the issue's thirty-two pages, nearly all are taken up with jokes, lilƒ3