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  • Published: 1 May 2001
  • ISBN: 9780375756498
  • Imprint: Random House US Group
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 512
  • RRP: $65.00

The Fun of It

Stories from The Talk of the Town




William Shawn once called The Talk of the Town the soul of the magazine. The section began in the first issue, in 1925. But it wasn't until a couple of years later, when E. B. White and James Thurber arrived, that the Talk of the Town story became what it is today: a precise piece of journalism that always gets the story and has a little fun along the way.

The Fun of It is the first anthology of Talk pieces that spans the magazine's life. Edited by Lillian Ross, the longtime Talk reporter and New Yorker staff writer, the book brings together pieces by the section's most original writers. Only in a collection of Talk stories will you find E. B. White visiting a potter's field; James Thurber following Gertrude Stein at Brentano's; Geoffrey Hellman with Cole Porter at the Waldorf Towers; A. J. Liebling on a book tour with Albert Camus; Maeve Brennan ventriloquizing the long-winded lady; John Updike navigating the passageways of midtown; Calvin Trillin marching on Washington in 1963; Jacqueline Onassis chatting with Cornell Capa; Ian Frazier at the Monster Truck and Mud Bog Fall Nationals; John McPhee in virgin forest; Mark Singer with sixth-graders adopting Hudson River striped bass; Adam Gopnik in Flatbush visiting the ìgrandest theatre devoted exclusively to the movies; Hendrik Hertzberg pinning down a Sulzberger on how the Times got colorized; George Plimpton on the tennis court with Boris Yeltsin; and Lillian Ross reporting good little stories for more than forty-five years. They and dozens of other Talk contributors provide an entertaining tour of the most famous section of the most famous magazine in the world.

  • Published: 1 May 2001
  • ISBN: 9780375756498
  • Imprint: Random House US Group
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 512
  • RRP: $65.00

About the authors

John Updike

JOHN UPDIKE is the author of more than sixty books, eight of them collections of poetry. His novels won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle, and the William Dean Howells Medal of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He died in January 2009.

James Thurber

James Thurber was born in 1894 in Ohio. After leaving college, he joined the then-struggling New Yorker magazine, helping to change its fortunes with the unique wit of his writings and cartoons. He was to remain a contributor for the rest of his life. Thurber's sophisticated humour saw him achieve worldwide fame and success, with almost thirty books of fiction, cartoons, children's stories and essays translated into dozens of languages, and his most famous work, The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, was made into a film with Danny Kaye as the eponymous hero. James Thurber died in 1961.