Introduction / David Remnick -- The Five-Forty-Eight / John Cheever -- Distant Music / Ann Beattie -- Sailor off the Bremen / Irwin Shaw -- Physics / Tama Janowitz -- The Whore of Mensa / Woody Allen -- What It Was Like, Seeing Chris / Deborah Eisenberg -- Drawing Room B / John O'Hara -- A Sentimental Journey / Peter Taylor -- The Balloon / Donald Barthelme -- Smart Money / Philip Roth -- Another Marvellous Thing / Laurie Colwin -- The Failure / Jonathan Franzen -- Apartment Hotel / Sally Benson -- Midair / Frank Conroy -- The Catbird Seat / James Thurber -- Snowing in Greenwich Village / John Updike -- I See You, Bianca / Maeve Brennan -- You're Ugly, Too / Lorrie Moore -- Symbols and Signs / Vladimir Nabokov -- Poor Visitor / Jamaica Kincaid -- In Greenwich, There Are Many Gravelled Walks / Hortense Calisher -- Some Nights When Nothing Happens Are the Best Nights in This Place / John McNulty -- Slight Rebellion off Madison / J. D. Salinger -- Brownstone / Renata Adler -- The Cafeteria / Isaac Bashevis Singer -- Partners / Veronica Geng -- The Evolution of Knowledge / Niccolo Tucci -- The Way We Live Now / Susan Sontag -- Do the Windows Open? / Julie Hecht -- The Mentocrats / Edward Newhouse -- The Treatment / Daniel Menaker -- Arrangement in Black and White / Dorothy Parker -- Carlyle Tries Polygamy / William Melvin Kelley -- Children Are Bored on Sunday / Jean Stafford -- Notes from a Bottle / James Stevenson -- Man in the Middle of the Ocean / Daniel Fuchs -- Mespoulets of the Splendide / Ludwig Bemelmans -- Over by the River / William Maxwell -- Baster / Jeffrey Eugenides -- The Second Tree from the Corner / E. B. White -- Rembrandt's Hat / Bernard Malamud -- Shot: A New York Story / Elizabeth Hardwick -- A Father- to-Be / Saul Bellow -- Farewell, My Lovely Appetizer / S. J. Perelman. Decades of stories originally published in the magazine. Anthology of short fiction from eminent writers.