ew Yorker wit and wisdom “Everybody talks of The New Yorker‘s art, that is its illustrations, and it has just been described as the best magazine in the world for a person who can not read,” Harold Ross, the magazine’s founder and editor, wrote in a 1925 letter. Oh, how times have changed. Although it’s now a cultural institution, the magazine made a somewhat lackluster debut in February of 1925 and would have folded a few months later had it not been for Ross. A bluff, determined Westerner sometimes at odds with the Eastern elite, the editor fought hard to find a focus for his weekly. Rallying writers in the ’20s and ’30s many of them from the renowned Algonquin Round Table he created a forum that would publish some of the most memorable journalism of the 20th century. The magazine may be named for New York, but its span exceeds the city’s limits. Its list of contributors is long and illustrious John Cheever, Eudora Welty, James Baldwin and William Trevor, to name a few and the number of books written about it or featuring the work of its writers and artists gets bigger every season. Worthy titles crop up regularly we counted eight in the past six months alone and a few of the most recent releases are highlighted here.

One of America’s greatest humorists, New Yorker cartoonist James Thurber was an artist who could, with a few shapely, articulate lines, produce quibbling siblings, bickering spouses and, of course, canines dogs of all shapes and sizes, dispositions and breeds. His big, bumbling mutts were creatures that didn’t know the difference between man and beast, that dragged their owners whither they would and did things only humans could went snow-skiing, say, or got psychoanalyzed. These and other Thurberesque absurdities are collected in The Dog Department: James Thurber on Hounds, Scotties, and Talking Poodles, an endearing anthology, edited by author Michael Rosen, of the artist’s dog-centered writings and drawings. Comprised of New Yorker shorts and unpublished archival material, along with selections from the book Thurber’s Dogs, this delightful, amply illustrated volume is filled with humor, advice and reflection Thurber-style on man’s best friend.

In the 1930s, as a reporter for The New Yorker, John McNulty frequented Costello’s Irish saloon on Third Avenue, a boisterous gin mill filled with cabbies, horseplayers and bums on the make that he immortalized in the pages of the magazine. The results are collected in This Place on Third Avenue, a group of slice-of-life stories brimming with humor and drama that feature the saloon, its habituŽs and their pungent, city-steeped dialect. This is the low life writ large, no fringe, no frills. McNulty calls ’em as he sees ’em, and the titles tell all: “Atheist hit by truck.” “Man here keeps getting arrested all the time.” Though a skyscraper now stands at the site of Costello’s, thanks to McNulty, the spirit of the place and the era lives on.

The Fun of It: Stories from The Talk of the Town brings together the best of the magazine’s trademark “Talk” essays, those succinct journalistic gems, full of crystalline reportage and plainspoken prose, about the everyday and the remarkable, the little man and the big. Spanning nine decades, The Fun of It opens with selections from the 1920s and features contributions by some of the magazine’s best writers, from E. B. White to Jamaica Kincaid to John McPhee. Edited by long-time staff member Lillian Ross, who chose from thousands of pieces, the volume is studded with standouts. Especially memorable are antic essays on the city from a young John Updike, and Jane Kramer’s visit with Samuel Beckett and Buster Keaton.

Another collection of classic profiles by Joseph Mitchell, McSorley’s Wonderful Saloon was included in his anthology Up In the Old Hotel but has not existed as a separate volume since it was first published in 1943, when it became a bestseller. Offering a gallery of unforgettable characters oystermen, barkeeps and street-walking eccentrics, a gypsy king and a true-blue bearded lady McSorley’s is vintage reporting from the man The New York Times once called “a listener of genius.”

have been tortured by some of the fanciest ear-benders in the world, including George Bernard Shaw, reporter Joseph Mitchell wrote in 1938, “and I have long since lost my ability to detect insanity. Sometimes it is necessary for me to go into a psychopathic ward on a story and I never notice the difference.” Such is the life of a journalist. The consummate listener, a gentleman reporter whose Joycean stories about the everyday people of New York are tinged with melancholy, Joseph Mitchell went to work for The New Yorker in 1938. A notoriously slow and meticulous craftsman, he wrote with lapidary skill. A collection of his New Yorker pieces, Up in the Old Hotel, was a 1992 bestseller, but when Mitchell died four years later, he left precious little work.

Now, for the first time in more than 60 years, readers can treat themselves to the reportage of Mitchell’s pre-New Yorker days with the newly reissued My Ears Are Bent, a collection of his contributions to The Herald Tribune and The World Telegram, originally published in 1938. The new, expanded edition includes articles and feature stories unavailable since they first appeared in the papers during the 1930s. Mixing with lushes and chorus girls, pickpockets and speakeasy proprietors, the latter of which proved invaluable to the reporter (“the saloonkeeper is apt to know the address or hangout of any citizen dopey enough or unlucky enough to be of interest to a great metropolitan newspaper,” he writes), Mitchell, on his beat, visited establishments like the Broken Leg and Busted Bar ∧ Grill, where he observed and interviewed the regulars. The stories that resulted are miniature noirs peopled with characters who crack wise, journalistic pieces, replete with smoke and shadows and snappy badinage, that show the city at its seediest.

Along with looks at society’s less savory members, the new edition includes talks with Jimmy Durante, jazz giant Gene Krupa and George M. Cohan blasts from the past that give the book a time-capsule appeal. Indeed, a sort of na•vete pervades the pieces overall. Some of the strippers and fan dancers featured in a chapter called “Cheese-cake” seem to have an air of wide-eyed innocence, as Mitchell himself does in their presence: “It was the first time a woman I had been sent to interview ever came into the room naked . . .,” he writes. “She didn’t even have any shoes on.” In “The Marijuana Smokers” a classic snapshot of a more innocent America, a country befuddled by the new drug Mitchell dodges bullets and crashes a Harlem rent party. Such cultural curiosities are, of course, no longer news, but they were big scoops when Mitchell snooped them out. He writes with economy in these classy, clear-eyed accounts of a time when society was a bit more civilized. No words are wasted here, and his descriptive prose is often as pure and precise and image-oriented as the poetry of William Carlos Williams. Above all, perhaps, what Mitchell’s writing reveals is the way the world in general and New York in particular have changed. Reading My Ears Are Bent, one can’t help but contrast the present with the past. The collection reflects a younger era, an age when the world had more mystery in it. They don’t write ’em like this anymore.

One of the most telling parts of Larry Brown’s new book Billy Ray’s Farm comes in an essay called Goat Songs, when the author confuses a fictional story by William Faulkner with a true incident, related to him by his father, about the slaughtering of a goat in the 1930s. It’s as though, in Brown’s consciousness, fiction and reality, family and history got churned together, as though there were no division between Faulkner’s Mississippi and his own. This sort of interconnectedness of shared experience and triggered memories, of the unique inheritance that comes from being raised in a particular place lies at the heart of Billy Ray’s Farm. In these 10 essays, Brown writes about his apprenticeship as an author and about life on the family farm in Tula, Mississippi, where his son, Billy Ray, raises cattle. His voice and syntax in this volume are by turns lyrical, forceful and downright unruly ( the goat got gone; I don’t reckon bad luck ever takes a vacation. ) Unromantic, unembellished, full of humor, honesty and wisdom, the essays themselves are the stories of a man bound to the land on which he lives. The everyday activities in which Brown engages in Tula writing something or building something or cutting something down and dragging it somewhere are, needless to say, not all genteel.

Through- out the book, Brown makes no bones about his gritty, hands-on existence, and the end effect is a tone of raw authenticity that endears the writer to his audience. In a trio of wonderful essays Billy Ray’s Farm, Goat Songs and Shack, all of which deal with farm life, with the vicissitudes and brutality of nature Brown seems to delight in defying the writerly stereotype, the polite image of an author as a helpless intellectual lacking in practical skills. In The Whore in Me, a brief, humorous account of a book tour, he appears to be more interested in a gun show taking place in the convention center where he is reading than in literary affairs. An author without airs whose work is as unflinching as nature itself, Brown is what he is, and for that the reader is grateful.

Of the critical link between geography and writing, he says, You take what you’re given, whether it’s the cornfields of the Midwest or the coal mines of West Virginia, and you make your fiction out of it. It’s all you have. And somehow, wherever you are, it always seems to be enough. In Larry Brown’s case, it most certainly is.

James Alan McPherson, an African-American Pulitzer Prize-winning author and a professor at the Iowa Writers Workshop, has come a long way from his early life as a poor boy in racially segregated Savannah, Georgia. Yet, as his title indicates, he is troubled by questions of identity and belonging. The barriers that still exist in America between races, classes, and ethnic groups make him uneasy, cautious, and fearful for the fate of the country.

Longing for genuine community across his diverse and still-divided native land, McPherson is a spiritual heir of the novelist Ralph Ellison. In "Gravitas," an essay that is the finest piece of writing in this collection of reflections, McPherson pays tribute to Ellison, the renowned author of Invisible Man and Juneteenth, for his affirmation of his identity as a black man and for his recognition of the humanity of all men and women. Although Ellison regarded himself as a product of the complex history of blacks in this country, he also saw himself as an American and as a sibling of all people. The hurts of racism never made him back off from that image of himself. Still struggling, McPherson hopes he will be able to match his mentor’s equanimity.

Throughout his career, McPherson has drawn hostility from African-American intellectuals for putting American solidarity above black solidarity. "Junior and John Doe" will make him a target again. In this essay, McPherson is contemptuous of the black middle class and its success. He has no respect for this burgeoning success because, as he sees it, successful blacks have simply adopted the corrupt values of the white middle class, so devoted to the pursuit of wealth and possessions, so morally obtuse.

McPherson is convinced that the black middle class has lost the moral certainty that earlier generations of blacks in this country had, an ethical imperative that had been passed along as a kind of a legacy. Included in that legacy was the notion that any dehumanization of another human being was wrong. In pursuit of creature comforts, blacks have learned to lie and manipulate with the worst of whites.

The dozen pieces in this book have an autobiographical thread that allows us to see an American writer raising himself from humble beginnings to intellectual force, a writer who measures his own success by what he has contributed towards the building of an all-inclusive human community.

Paul Marx is a freelance writer in New Haven, Connecticut.

If you haven’t read the nonfiction works of Peter Matthiessen, or you merely yearn for a one-volume greatest hits album, a new book offers the ideal sampler buffet. The Peter Matthiessen Reader: A Selection of Nonfiction, the latest in Vintage’s ongoing series of handsome trade paperback series of Readers, features excerpts from every nonfiction book by Matthiessen in the period covered. From Wildlife in America to Sal Si Puedes: Cesar Chavez and the New American Revolution, from The Tree Where Man Was Born to In the Spirit of Crazy Horse the breadth is astonishing. With an artistry denied to most naturalists and an expertise few literary writers ever attain, Matthiessen easily earns his place in the pantheon of great nature writers. In a thoughtful introduction, the editor, McKay Jenkins, places Matthiessen’s work in the context of his life. The subsequent selections prove that Matthiessen is eagerly sometimes urgently trying to articulate the lives of the less articulate, whether animal or human. This broad sampling of his work reminds us that Matthiessen’s nature writing is motivated by the same curiosity, compassion, and love of life as his fiction. Like Thoreau, he is eager to report the glory of the universe.