Life Stories
Profiles from The New Yorker
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
One of art's purest challenges is to translate a human being into words. The New Yorker has met this challenge more successfully and more originally than any other modern American journal. It has indelibly shaped the genre known as the Profile. Starting with light-fantastic evocations of glamorous and idiosyncratic figures of the twenties and thirties, such as Henry Luce and Isadora Duncan, and continuing to the present, with complex pictures of such contemporaries as Mikhail Baryshnikov and Richard Pryor, this collection of New Yorker Profiles presents readers with a portrait gallery of some of the most prominent figures of the twentieth century. These Profiles are literary-journalistic investigations into character and accomplishment, motive and madness, beauty and ugliness, and are unrivalled in their range, their variety of style, and their embrace of humanity.
Including these twenty-eight profiles:
“Mr. Hunter’s Grave” by Joseph Mitchell
“Secrets of the Magus” by Mark Singer
“Isadora” by Janet Flanner
“The Soloist” by Joan Acocella
“Time . . . Fortune . . . Life . . . Luce” by Walcott Gibbs
“Nobody Better, Better Than Nobody” by Ian Frazier
“The Mountains of Pi” by Richard Preston
“Covering the Cops” by Calvin Trillin
“Travels in Georgia” by John McPhee
“The Man Who Walks on Air” by Calvin Tomkins
“A House on Gramercy Park” by Geoffrey Hellman
“How Do You Like It Now, Gentlemen?” by Lillian Ross
“The Education of a Prince” by Alva Johnston
“White Like Me” by Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
“Wunderkind” by A. J. Liebling
“Fifteen Years of The Salto Mortale” by Kenneth Tynan
“The Duke in His Domain” by Truman Capote
“A Pryor Love” by Hilton Als
“Gone for Good” by Roger Angell
“Lady with a Pencil” by Nancy Franklin
“Dealing with Roseanne” by John Lahr
“The Coolhunt” by Malcolm Gladwell
“Man Goes to See a Doctor” by Adam Gopnik
“Show Dog” by Susan Orlean
“Forty-One False Starts” by Janet Malcolm
“The Redemption” by Nicholas Lemann
“Gore Without a Script” by Nicholas Lemann
“Delta Nights” by Bill Buford
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
To long-time readers of the New Yorker, one of the reasons to welcome this excellent collection of 43 stories written over the past seven decades will be the recollection of their first encounters with some of the writers who were fresh new voices when their stories set in Manhattan first appeared. Such then-newcomers as Lorrie Moore, Jeffrey Eugenides, Deborah Eisenberg, Anne Beattie and Laurie Colwin portray New York in their distinctive voices. The literary Old Guard is here in solid phalanx too: stories by John Updike, Bernard Malamud, John O'Hara, Elizabeth Hardwick, John Cheever, Peter Taylor and William Maxwell define aspects of their decades with timeless clarity. Holden Morrisey Caulfield makes his debut in J. P. Salinger's "A Slight Rebellion Off Madison"(1946); Philip Roth's millionaire author Zuckerman is accosted on Second Avenue in "Smart Money"(1981); one of Isaac Bashevis Singer's innumerable group of displaced Jews and ardent lovers holds forth in "The Cafeteria" (1968) on the Lower East Side. At opposite ends of the emotional spectrum, two entries, Woody Allen's "The Whore of Mensa," (1974) and "Mid-Air" (1984), by Frank Conroy, have become classics. Published this year, Jonathan Franzen's "The Failure" defines the `90s in the city, yet Maeve Brennan's 1966 "I See You, Bianca," a quiet narrative about loss highlighted by "the struggle for space in Manhattan," could have been written today. If Dorothy Parker's wit now seems shrill ("Arrangement in Black and White," 1927 ), and Irwin Shaw's "Sailor Off the Bremen," from the same year, seems mannered, Jean Stafford's "Children Are Bored on Sunday"(1948), still resonates with a peculiarly New York atmosphere. Of course, there are tales from such New Yorker stalwarts as John McNulty, S. J. Perelman, E. B. White and James Thurber. Manhattan as geographical area and emotional landscape takes visible shape as haven and hell, locus of opportunity and of dead end lives.
