William Shawn once called <i>The Talk of the Town</i> the soul of the magazine. The section began in the first issue, in 1925. But it wasn't until a couple of years later, when E. B. White and James Thurber arrived, that the <i>Talk of the Town </i>story became what it is today: a precise piece of journalism that always gets the story and has a little fun along the way.<br><br><b>The Fun of It</b> is the first anthology of <i>Talk</i> pieces that spans the magazine's life. Edited by Lillian Ross, the longtime <i>Talk</i> reporter and <i>New Yorker</i> staff writer, the book brings together pieces by the section's most original writers. Only in a collection of <i>Talk</i> stories will you find E. B. White visiting a potter's field; James Thurber following Gertrude Stein at Brentano's; Geoffrey Hellman with Cole Porter at the Waldorf Towers; A. J. Liebling on a book tour with Albert Camus; Maeve Brennan ventriloquizing the long-winded lady; John Updike navigating the passageways of midtown; Calvin Trillin marching on Washington in 1963; Jacqueline Onassis chatting with Cornell Capa; Ian Frazier at the Monster Truck and Mud Bog Fall Nationals; John McPhee in virgin forest; Mark Singer with sixth-graders adopting Hudson River striped bass; Adam Gopnik in Flatbush visiting the ìgrandest theatre devoted exclusively to the movies; Hendrik Hertzberg pinning down a Sulzberger on how the<i> Times</i> got colorized; George Plimpton on the tennis court with Boris Yeltsin; and Lillian Ross reporting good little stories for more than forty-five years. They and dozens of other Talk contributors provide an entertaining tour of the most famous section of the most famous magazine in the world.