Snooze: The Best of Our Magazine

Familiarity with the New Yorker's distinctive style and stable of writers helps the reader to appreciate fully this parody. The chuckles start with ""Lettuce Anyone?'' by Alexander Woolcott Gibbs and continue with John McPhumpher's ``Annals of Sand'' series, Dike Upjohn's ``Of the Breezeway,'' Susan Stooptag's ``Down and Backward with the Arts'' and Elizabeth Drone's ``Giant Postcard from Washington.'' A particularly effective piece is ``Moveable Feasts,'' a spoof of a typical ``Talk of the Town'' item, in which ``we'' wander the streets in search of the quintessential quick lunchan item complete with drawings of hot dogs (with and without sauerkraut), ``tired and sweaty'' fruit cups and ``leaden'' hot pretzels. ``A Perfect Day for Banana Daiquiris'' by D. J. Balinger wins the funniest fiction prize. Although this humor is certainly on target, it's best read in several sittings since the joke wears thin after the first several hundred pages. 75,000 first printing. (December)