Talk Stories is a collection of Jamaica Kincaid's original writing for The New Yorker's "Talk of the Town", composed from 1978 to 1983, after she first came to the United States from Antigua. Kincaid found a unique voice, at once in sync with William Shawn's tone for the quintessential elite insider's magazine and (though unsigned) all her own -- wonderingly alive to the ironies and screwball details that characterized her adopted city. She meets Miss Jamaica, visiting from Kingston, and escorts the reader to the West Indian Day parade in Brooklyn; she sees Ed Koch don his "Cheshire-cat smile" and watches Tammy Wynette autograph a copy of Lattimore's Odyssey; she learns the worlds of publishing and partying, of fashion and popular music, and how to call cauliflower a crudite.