Books about Yorkers from Amazon.com

Since its earliest days, The New Yorker has been a tastemaker–literally. As the home of A. J. Liebling, Joseph Wechsberg, and M.F.K. Fisher, who practically invented American food writing, the magazine established a tradition that is carried forward today by irrepressible literary gastronomes, including Calvin Trillin, Bill Buford, Adam Gopnik, Jane Kramer, and Anthony Bourdain. Now, in this indispensable collection, The New Yorker dishes up a feast of delicious writing on food and drink, seasoned with a generous dash of cartoons.

Whether you’re in the mood for snacking on humor pieces and cartoons or for savoring classic profiles of great chefs and great eaters, these offerings, from every age of The New Yorker’s fabled eighty-year history, are sure to satisfy every taste. There are memoirs, short stories, tell-alls, and poems–ranging in tone from sweet to sour and in subject from soup to nuts.

M.F.K. Fisher pays homage to “cookery witches,” those mysterious cooks who possess “an uncanny power over food,” while John McPhee valiantly trails an inveterate forager and is rewarded with stewed persimmons and white-pine-needle tea. There is Roald Dahl’s famous story “Taste,” in which a wine snob’s palate comes in for some unwelcome scrutiny, and Julian Barnes’s ingenious tale of a lifelong gourmand who goes on a very peculiar diet for still more peculiar reasons. Adam Gopnik asks if French cuisine is done for, and Calvin Trillin investigates whether people can actually taste the difference between red wine and white. We journey with Susan Orlean as she distills the essence of Cuba in the story of a single restaurant, and with Judith Thurman as she investigates the arcane practices of Japan’s tofu masters. Closer to home, Joseph Mitchell celebrates the old New York tradition of the beefsteak dinner, and Mark Singer shadows the city’s foremost fisherman-chef.

Selected from the magazine’s plentiful larder, Secret Ingredients celebrates all forms of gustatory delight..
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The second revision in sixty years, this sublime collection ranges over the verse, stories, essays, and journalism of one of the twentieth century’s most quotable authors..
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In 1995 Gopnik was offered the plush assignment of writing the "Paris Journals" for the New Yorker. He spent five years in Paris with his wife, Martha, and son, Luke, writing dispatches now collected here along with previously unpublished journal entries. A self-described "comic-sentimental essayist," Gopnik chose the romance of Paris in its particulars as his subject. Gopnik falls in unabashed love with what he calls Paris's commonplace civilization--the cafés, the little shops, the ancient carousel in the park, and the small, intricate experiences that happen in such settings. But Paris can also be a difficult city to love, particularly its pompous and abstract official culture with its parallel paper universe. The tension between these two sides of Paris and the country's general brooding over the decline of French dominance in the face of globalization (haute couture, cooking, and sex, as well as the economy, are running deficits) form the subtexts for these finely wrought and witty essays. With his emphasis on the micro in the macro, Gopnik describes trying to get a Thanksgiving turkey delivered during a general strike and his struggle to find an apartment during a government scandal over favoritism in housing allocations. The essays alternate between reports of national and local events and accounts of expatriate family life, with an emphasis on "the trinity of late-century bourgeois obsessions: children and cooking and spectator sports, including the spectator sport of shopping." Gopnik describes some truly delicious moments, from the rites of Parisian haute couture, to the "occupation" of a local brasserie in protest of its purchase by a restaurant tycoon, to the birth of his daughter with the aid of a doctor in black jeans and a black silk shirt, open at the front. Gopnik makes terrific use of his status as an observer on the fringes of fashionable society to draw some deft comparisons between Paris and New York ("It is as if all American appliances dreamed of being cars while all French appliances dreamed of being telephones") and do some incisive philosophizing on the nature of both. This is masterful reportage with a winning infusion of intelligence, intimacy, and charm. --Lesley Reed.
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Seventy-five of Peter Schjeldahl's engaging pieces on art from The New Yorker, published together for the first time.

Distinguished critic at The New Yorker since 1998, Peter Schjeldahl has been described as America's most influential writer on art. Blessed with an unerring eye, he tackles a myriad of subjects with wit, poetry, and perspicacity, examining and questioning the art before him while reveling in the power and beauty of language. His writing springs from a desire to be understood by all readers, and a determination to help them engage with art of every kind.

Covering subjects drawn from a broad canvas of the history of art—from ancient Greece, Mexico, and Byzantium, through Raphael, Rubens, and Rembrandt, to Bruce Nauman, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and John Currin—the writings collected here seek out with precision and economy the essence of the individual artist or work under discussion, but they never lose sight of the bigger picture: What is beauty? What does it mean to be an American artist? What can the art we produce and admire tell us about ourselves?

With an imaginative introduction—twenty questions, each one posed to Schjeldahl by a different artist or writer—this collection will appeal to anyone who considers the experience of art, and of writing on art, an invitation to a voyage.

Coverage includes:
• large-scale exhibitions at leading institutions around the world
• shows at private galleries
• profiles of prominent members of the art world
• personal accounts of time spent with artists
• the influences of museum spaces on our experience of art.
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Journalist Joseph Mitchell, whose death in in May 1996 at the age of 87 merited a half-page obituary in the New York Times, pioneered a style of journalism while crafting brilliant magazine pieces for the New Yorker from the 1930s to the early 1960s. Up in the Old Hotel, a collection of his best reporting, is a 700-page joy to read.

Mitchell lovingly chronicled the lives of odd New York characters. In the pages of Up In the Old Hotel, the reader passes through places such as McSorley's Old Ale House or the Fulton Fish Market that many observers might have found ordinary. But when experienced through Mitchell's gifted eye, the reader will see that these haunts of old New York possess poetry, beauty, and meaning. .
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This wonderful collection of the best and funniest cartoons published over the last eighty years in The New Yorker takes a wry look into the classroom--at the students, at thier blindly devoted but demanding parents, and especially, at the teachers who negotiate the delicate balance between those forces every day. With 118 cartoons, this is a perfect gift for teachers and a treasure of laughs for all!.
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Each week about fifty New Yorker cartoonists submit ten ideas, yielding five hundred cartoons for no more than twenty spots in the magazine. Arguably the most brilliant single-panel-gag cartoonists in the world create a bunch of cartoons every week that never see the light of day.

These rejects were piling up in the dusty corners of studios all over the country. Sam Gross, who has been contributing since 1962, has more than 12,000 rejected cartoons. (Seriously. He's been numbering every single cartoon he's ever submitted to The New Yorker since the very beginning.) Enter editor Matthew Diffee. He tapped his fellow cartoonists, asking them to rescue these hilarious lost gems. From the artists' stacks of all-time favorite rejects, Diffee handpicked the standouts -- the cream of the crap -- and created The Rejection Collection, a place where good ideas go when they die. Too risqué, silly, or weird for The New Yorker, the cartoons in this book offer something no other collection has: They have never been seen in print until now.

With a foreword by New Yorker cartoon editor Robert Mankoff that explains the sound judgment, respectability, and scruples not found anywhere in these pages, and handwritten questionnaires that introduce the quirky character of each artist, The Rejection Collection will appeal to fans of The New Yorker...and to anyone with a slightly sick sense of humor..
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Fans of The New Yorker will be dazzled by The Complete New Yorker, a collection that includes every page of every issue, from full-color covers to spot drawings, from poetry to Profiles, from cartoons to advertisements--all on 8 searchable DVDs. No need to save old issues, with this package, you'll have every article, cartoon, illustration, and advertisement, as it appeared in print, at your fingertips. The Complete New Yorker covers the magazine's entire history, from February 1925 to February 2005, providing a detailed yet panoramic history of the life of the city, the nation, and the world.

With The Complete New Yorker, you'll be able to:

Browse by Cover (click to zoom):

Search by Keyword (click to zoom):

View Entire Articles (click to zoom):

Search the archives for your favorite articles, cartoons, covers, and see them exactly as they appeared in print:

(October 13, 1934):

(August 31, 1946)

(September 23, 1961):

(July 22, 1974):

(September 10, 2001):

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Each week The New Yorker receives more than 500 submissions from its regular cartoonists, who are all vying for one of the 20 coveted spots in the magazine. So what happens to the 75 percent of cartoons that don't make the cut? Some go back in a drawer, others go up on the refrigerator or into the filing cabinet ... but the very best of all the rejects can be found right here in these pages.

The Rejection Collection Vol. 2: The Cream of the Crap is the ultimate scrap heap of creative misfires--from the lowbrow and the dirty to the politically incorrect and the weird, these rejects represent the best of the worst ... in the best possible sense of the word. Handpicked by editor Matthew Diffee, these hilarious cartoons are accompanied by handwritten questionnaires and photographed self-portraits, providing a rare glimpse into the minds of the artists behind the rejection.

With appendices that explore the top ten reasons why cartoons are rejected and examine the solitary nature of the job of cartooning--plus a special bonus section of questions asked of and answered by cartoon editor Robert Mankoff--this sequel to The Rejection Collection offers even deeper insight into the exercise in frustration, patience, and amusement that is being a New Yorker cartoonist.

Warped, wicked, and wildly funny, The Rejection Collection Vol. 2 will appeal to every New Yorker fan--and everyone with a taste for the absurd.

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Amazon Exclusive

A Cartoon from Matthew Diffee Here's a cartoon that's very different from the rest of mine. This one, unlike the others, has never been rejected by The New Yorker magazine. I did it especially for Amazon. Would it have been rejected if I had submitted it? I think I can safely say yes. That's not to say it isn't any good. It's just the mathematics involved. Like all the regular cartoonists in The New Yorker, 90 percent of my work gets rejected. Yep, it's sad, isn't it? We all do ten or more cartoons a week, pitch them to the magazine, and on a good week they'll take one of them. The rest disappear forever--at least they used to. Now we save our rejects up and put the best of them in The Rejection Collection. This is volume two, and just like the first one, it's full of cartoons that make the cartoonists laugh and the editors cringe. That's because, in most cases, these are wildly inappropriate for the pages of a sophisticated literary magazine. I think you'll see what I mean when you take a look. And if you ask me, just knowing that these gags were ever submitted to The New Yorker at all makes them a little bit funnier--maybe 6 percent. --Matthew Diffee

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