Description: Harold Ross once said he wanted he wanted his magazine to be not about but of New York City, and this masterful, brilliantly varied collection fits that bill. Isaac Singer writes of the ubiquitous problems of love as they haunt the quirky heart of an aging Jewish Westsider. With compassion and subtle insight Cynthia Ozick dramatizes the trials of Ruth Puttermesser as she looks for a life in New York and is in her own way haunted -- by the inescapable ghost of the Holocaust. In "Over by the River", William Maxwell, in his deceptively quiet voice, makes a moving story out of the ordinary conflicts in an ordinary man's life. In "The Slaves in New York", Tama Janowitz recounts with high energy and fresh humor a uniquely Manhattan but somehow entirely universal boy-meets-girl story about artists and emigres. In his classic "The Enormous Radio", John Cheever transforms the idea of a broadcast into a metaphor for the ultimately unsilenceable secrets of an apartment house's private lives.

New York City is an emblem of boundless possibilites -- the highest hopes, the lowest lives -- and fiction writers have always been drawn to its great scale and the broad scope of its complex human stories. John O'Hara, Harold Brodkey, Wendy Wasserstein, Updike, Barthelme, Julie Hecht -- the list of authors reads like a literary pantheon. In their hands and in their minds' eyes, the city itself becomes a great character, with the kind of range and impact that any major literary character achieves. Like New York, "Wonderful Town" contains the anomalous and the commonplace, shock and comfort, triumph and melancholy.

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