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Zusatztext "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." --T he Plain Dealer (Cleveland) Informationen zum Autor David Remnick is the editor of The New Yorker . He won the Pulitzer Prize in 1994 for Lenin's Tomb and is also the author of Resurrection 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. Klappentext New York City is not only The New Yorker' s place of origin and its sensibility's lifeblood; it is the heart of American literary culture. Wonderful Town collects 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 in Wonderful Town , is the life of us all. Leseprobe 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, light verse, anecdotes, squib-length reviews, abbreviated accounts of this or that incident, and harmless gossip about metropolitan life. With Rea Irvin's Eustace Tilley peering through his monocle at a butterfly on the cover, with its cartoons and drawings of uptown flappers, Fifth Avenue dowagers, and Wall Street men with their mistresses out on the town, with its very name, the magazine announced its identity--or at least the earliest version of it. There was a column called "In Our Midst" that delivered one-sentence news briefs on the city's forgotten and barely remembered ("Crosby Gaige, of here and Peekskill, is leaving for Miami next week to join the pleasure seekers in the sunny southland"); there was "Jottings About Town" by Busybody ("A newstand where periodicals, books and candy may be procured is now to be found at Pennsylvania Station"); there were reports of overheard talk on "Fifth Avenue at 3 p.m.," musical notes by "Con Brio," and theater notes by "Last Night." With an advisory board of editors that included Irvin, George S. Kaufman, Dorothy Parker, and Alexander Woolcott, Ross's first issue had the feel of an amusement put together by an in-crowd of amused, and amusing, New York friends. One of the squibs, called "From the Opinions of a New Yorker," is typical of the throwaway, unearthshaking tone of that first issue: New York is noisy. New York is overcrowded. New York is ugly. New York is unhealthy. New York is outrageously expensive. New York is bitterly cold in winter. New York is steaming hot in summer. I wouldn't live outside New York for anything in the world. It was essentially impossible to see what a various and ambitious publications The New Yorker would become. In his original prospectus for the magazine, Ross said he intended to publish "prose and verse, short and long, humorous, satirical and miscellaneous." No mention of f...
