NORA EPHRON COLLECTED <i> by Nora Ephron (Avon: $8.95).</i>

An outspoken feminist, the screenwriter of “When Harry Met Sally” often finds herself exasperated by the excesses of both feminism and male sexism in these pungent, pointedly funny essays. Her accounts of such American phenomena as the advertising campaigns for feminine-hygiene spray and Julie Nixon Eisenhower’s defense of her beleaguered father are singularly devastating. Ephron dismisses some reporters’ comments that “Julie doesn’t seem like a Nixon at all” as “a remark so patently absurd as to make one conclude either that they haven’t heard a word she is saying or that they have been around Nixon so long they don’t recognize a chocolate-covered spider when they see one.” Although many of the individual essays are highly entertaining, the collection seems to have been cobbled together out of odds and ends. Some sort of update or afterthoughts would help put the articles from the early ‘70s in perspective: A dozen years after the fact, does anyone still care about the dubious antics of Margaret Trudeau?