WONDERFUL TOWN: New York Stories from the New Yorker.(Review)(Brief Article)

EDITED BY DAVID REMNICK WITH SUSAN CHOT. Random, $26.95 (480p) ISBN 0-375-50355-2

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, …