Editor’s Choice
New York Stories: Landmark Writing From Four Decades of New York Magazine edited by Steve Fishman, John Homans, and Adam Moss, foreword by Tom Wolfe (Random House, 570 pages, $17 paper). As media stories go, it caused barely a blip on the radar screen a week ago: food critic (and X-rated novelist and memoirist) Gael Greene’s dismissal from New York Magazine. One discovers, though, on the fly from the editor’s introduction to this great anthology (in which we find her 1970 piece “How Not to Be Humiliated in Smart Restaurants”) that she’d been “the only writer who has appeared regularly” from the beginning of New York Magazine to its present day.
This is it, really — ground zero for the long-ubiquitous transformation of American journalism at the hands of Clay Felker, who “began his journalistic career as a sportswriter at Life Magazine, spent most of the early ’60s as a top editor at Esquire, where he helped invent what came to be known as the New Journalism, with its vivid, highly subjective storytelling techniques.” Felker died earlier this year and this terrific anthology is dedicated to him, which comes with Tom Wolfe’s tribute in the foreword to his longtime editor and legendary co-conspirator.
It’s all here: Wolfe’s original report on “Radical Chic” with its intimations, he says, of “political correctness” to come; Wolfe’s discovery of “The Me Decade” (which turned out to be our entire era), the Nik Cohn piece from which the film “Saturday Night Fever” was born, Gloria Steinem’s pre-Ms. magazine manifesto “After Black Power, Women’s Liberation,” and Nicolas Pileggi’s “Wiseguy” (which eventually bequeathed Scorsese’s masterwork “GoodFellas” to us all) and Ron Rosenbaum’s 1978 “Sid Vicious and Nauseating Nancy: A Love Story.”
Who ever expected a historical archive to be this vital, lively and influential?
— Jeff Simon
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