Wonderful Town: New York Stories from The New Yorker by David Remnick, Tyne Daly, Maria Tucci, and Joe Morton

Buy Wonderful Town: New York Stories from The New Yorker here. To find out more information or to view another item in this category, click next Literature & Fiction. To go back to where you were looking, use the "you are here" links below. Thank you for shopping at audiobookoncd.com!

Wonderful Town: New York Stories from The New Yorker from Literature & Fiction

Wonderful Town: New York Stories from The New Yorker
Available from Amazon
Price: $9.95
Updated on 6-30-2008.

Features

Audio CD

Publisher: Random House Audio; Abridged edition (March 7, 2000)

Language: English

ISBN-10: 0375409556

ISBN-13: 978-0375409554

Product Dimensions: 6 x 5.1 x 1.5 inches

Shipping Weight: 11.7 ounces

Amazon.com
"Ah, what can ever be more stately and admirable to me than mast-hemm'd Manhattan?" marveled the excitable Walt Whitman in 1865. The skinny island and its four sister boroughs have continued to fascinate writers ever since, and it would be hard to find a better record of that fascination than Wonderful Town: New York Stories from The New Yorker. As David Remnick explains in his foreword, the fledgling magazine paid relatively little heed to the nuts and bolts of metropolitan life, and in his original prospectus, Harold Ross didn't even mention fiction. But in the following decades, Ross and his successors published so many classic New York stories that the real challenge, according to Remnick, was whittling down the selection: "As there is barely enough room in this city to contain all of its busy, funny, angry, joyful, carping, and canny inhabitants, there was barely enough room to contain the wide range of stories we agreed upon." So what made the grade? There are treasures from John Cheever ("The Five-Forty-Eight"), James Thurber ("The Catbird Seat"), Maeve Brennan ("I See You, Bianca"), Isaac Bashevis Singer ("The Cafeteria"), Jamaica Kincaid ("Poor Visitor"), and many others. The uptown neighborhoods appear to be more generously represented--a token, perhaps, of the magazine's well-heeled, fur-bearing readership--but from early Updike to middle-period Tama Janowitz, there are plenty of excursions south of Fourteenth Street. It's not, however, a simple matter of geography, but a kind of urban metaphysics at work. There are numerous and overlapping New Yorks represented in this collection: you'll find John Cheever's postwar paradise cheek-by-jowl with Ann Beattie's yuppie stomping ground. Then there's James Stevenson's vision of a flooded Gotham:

We are on the roof now. I have no idea what time it is, but it is daylight. The lower buildings have been submerged, the tall office buildings stand like tombstones above the heaving waves. There are whitecaps toward Central Park. An ocean liner stood by the Pan Am building for a while, then moved out to sea.... The water is swirling around the skylights now. The wind shifts. The waves are coming straight in from the Atlantic.

Even in this postapocalyptic setting, New York stubbornly remains itself. A wonderful town indeed--and a wonderful collection to celebrate it. --Anita Urquhart --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal
Two anthologies are being published in honor of The New Yorker's 75th anniversary, with multiple readers. The unabridged stories selected from Wonderful Town are about New York, and their authors include Salinger, Updike, Roth, and Wasserstein. The companion volume is Life Stories (see, below).
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Reader Reviews
This review is from: Wonderful Town: New York Stories from The New Yorker (Hardcover) This collection of New York stories shows both why writers have been fascinated with the Big Apple for so long and also why The New Yorker has been the hallmark of short fiction. The collection begins with Cheever and ends with Perlman, which pretty much sums up the golden years of the magazine. The pleasures here range from a story of lingering urban dread by William Maxwell to a hilarious tale of an intellectual loser by Jonathan Franzen. Updike's story both paints a true picture of New York in the snow and returns to his favorite theme -- infidelity. Philip Roth has a hilarious entry about a famous writer hounded by a game show contestant -- even funnier if you've seen "Quiz Show." The collection made me homesick for New York. It's one of the best books I read in 2000. Comment | Permalink | (Report this)

Wonderful Town: New York Stories from The New Yorker
Available from Amazon
Price: $9.95
Updated on 6-30-2008.