Wonderful Town: New York Stories from the New Yorker - Rilegato

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ISBN 10: 0375503560 ISBN 13: 9780375503566

Casa editrice: Random House Inc, 2000

Riassunto

New York City is not only The New Yorker magazine's place of origin and its sensibility's lifeblood, it is the heart of American literary culture. Wonderful Town, an anthology of superb short fiction by many of the magazine's most accomplished contributors, celebrates the seventy-five-year marriage between a preeminent publication and its preeminent context with this collection of  forty-four of its best stories from (so to speak) home.

        East Side? Philip Roth's chronically tormented alter ego Nathan Zuckerman has just moved there, in "Smart Money." West Side? Isaac Bashevis Singer's narrator mingles with the customers in "The Cafeteria" (who debate politics and culture in four or five different languages) and becomes embroiled in an obsessional romance. And downtown, John Updike's Maples have begun their courtship of marital disaster, in "Snowing in Greenwich Village." John Cheever, John O'Hara, Lorrie Moore, Irwin Shaw, Woody Allen, Laurie Colwin, Saul Bellow, J. D. Salinger, Jean Stafford, Vladimir Nabokov--they and many other stellar literary guides to the city will be found in these pages.

Wonderful Town touches on some of the city's famous places and stops at some of its more obscure corners, but the real guidebook in and between its lines is to the hearts and the minds of those who populate the metropolis built by its pages. 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. The five boroughs are the five continents. New York is every great and ordinary place. Each life in it, and each life in Wonderful Town, is the life of us all.

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Recensione:

Goings On About Town

"Sally and Lueger walked slowly down Twelfth Street. Lueger had his arm around Sally's waist. 'That was a very fine film tonight,' he was saying. 'I enjoy Deanna Durbin. Very young, fresh, sweet. Like you.'"
--"Sailor off the Bremen," by Irwin Shaw

"At Thirty-fourth Street, a young man got on, and slid into the seat beside the girl. 'Hello, Helpless,' he said. "'Helpless is a kind name for it,' she said."
--"Apartment Hotel," by Sally Benson

"He shouldered the bags himself and assumed the burden of seeing La Guardia Airport and New York City and his life and his clothes and body through the disappointed eyes of his parents. He noticed, as if for the first time, the dirty linoleum, the assassinlike chauffeurs holding up signs with other people's names on them, the snarl of wires dangling from a hole in the ceiling."
--"The Failure," by Jonathan Franzen

"I got into an elevator, something I had never done before, and then I was in an apartment and seated at a table, eating food just taken from a refrigerator. In Antigua, where I came from, I had always lived in a house, and my house did not have a refrigerator in it."         --"Poor Visitor," by Jamaica Kincaid

"After I got my hair cut at High Style 2000 on Lexington Avenue, I was hit by a car. It wasn't even a very nice vehicle, just a blue-and-white Pinto....I kept staring at the license plate: it said 867-UHH."   --"Physics," by Tama Janowitz

"From a striped chimney buried in the asphalt, steam shot up into the air. A few tourists were standing around it, making low Swedish sounds, amazed by our volcanic streets."                --"Baster," by  Jeffrey Eugenides

"The thin galoot outside Gristede's had taken a powder when I got there; that meant we were no longer playing girls' rules. I hired a hack to Wanamaker's, cut over to Third, walked up toward Fourteenth. At Twelfth, a mink-faced jasper made up as a street cleaner tailed me for a block."
--"Farewell, My Lovely Appetizer," by S. J. Perelman

L'autore:

DAVID REMNICK is the editor of The New Yorker. He began his career as a sportswriter for The Washington Post and won the Pulitzer Prize in 1994 for Lenin's Tomb. He is also the author of Resurrection and The Devil Problem and Other True Stories, a collection of essays. He lives in New York City with his wife and three children.

Su questa edizione

• Editore: Random House Inc
• Data di pubblicazione: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0375503560
• ISBN 13: 9780375503566
• Rilegatura: Copertina rigida
• Numero di pagine: 480
• Redattore: Remnick David, Choi Susan