A Century of Fiction in the New Yorker, edited by Deborah Treisman

A Century of Fiction in the New Yorker: 1925-2025

Edited by Deborah Treisman

Knopf 2025

Incredibly, improbably, The New Yorker magazine turns 100 years old in 2025, and Knopf has kicked off the very much deserved celebrations in spectacular fashion, with two enormous anthology volumes, one for poetry and then this one, edited by Deborah Treisman, for a century of the short stories for which The New Yorker has become famous.

Every reader of contemporary fiction will be able to name at least a dozen authors whose careers began with a New Yorker publication or were effectively jump-started by such a publication, and plenty of those same readers will be able to name specific short stories that first saw print in the magazine’s pages, much-anthologized classics like “The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson or “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” by James Thurber. It’s likely that long-time New Yorker readers could reel off dozens of fantastic stories they’ve read there over the years. And since The New Yorker has always offered prospective authors both a wide readership and a decent pay-rate, the magazine has been a proving laboratory for fictional concepts at least since the first wave of American writers returned from the Second World War. As Treisman very rightly notes, “Reading through New Yorker fiction from the first century of the magazine is like watching a time-lapse film in which a story is, or intends to be, changes slightly with each frame.”

There are two perils when embarking on an anthology like this, one small and one large. The small one is that the editor will not only gas on and on in their Introduction but that they’ll also commit the foremost sin of editors by including their own work in their anthology (hence, we could combine the two prongs of this little peril and call it The Updike). Here Treisman is acquitted: she’s not in the Table of Contents, and her Introduction, in addition to being respectful to some of the many New Yorker anthologies of earlier years, is also almost wistfully brief.

She wrestles with the rationale for including or excluding works, as any conscientious editor must. “Should [stories] be chosen to represent the work of writers who had been important in the magazine’s history, or was the goal to showcase stories, stories that held up in the memory, in the culture, in the popular imagination, regardless of their byline?” she asks. “Should I jettison stories that were beloved in their time but now felt a little dusty, a little too of their time?” These are wise questions. A story can represent a landmark without being good, after all. By far the most famous gay short story in New Yorker history, for instance, is Annie Proulx’s “Brokeback Mountain” (included here), which is light-years superior to the first gay short story the magazine ever published.

The second, larger peril is more intimately connected with that mention of stories being too much of their time, which in the last decade has been code-speak for “stories that do not conform to every detail of the political opinions I myself virtue-signal on social media.” That very line of Treisman’s prompts spine-shivers and conjures horrifying visions of what this anthology might have been: shrill, hectoring, revisionist, score-settling.

And again, marvelously, Treisman is acquitted completely. She has chosen 78 stories here (why in Heaven’s name not 100? This book is 1100 pages long, weighs 8 pounds, and costs $50 – would those extra 22 stories really have broken the spirit of the presumably small number of likely customers?) that almost entirely reflect the low-key glory of fiction in The New Yorker, from “Where Is the Voice Coming From” by Eudora Welty to “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” by JD Salinger to “The Five-Forty-Eight” by John Cheever to “The Pugilist at Rest” by Thom Jones.

“Almost entirely” because, naturally, the certainty of historical judgement becomes fuzzier the closer the anthology gets to the present day. Treisman frankly acknowledges this. “About the last two decades it’s almost impossible for me to opine,” she writes with the same smart honesty that runs throughout her Introduction and makes me wish, gulp, that it were longer. “I cannot see the forest for the trees; the root systems are still buried, and will, I presume, be dug up by whoever comes next.”

There is no – literally zero – chance that The New Yorker will reach 200 years, so that “whoever comes next” will be working in more freshly-planted vineyards. But the centenary is the anniversary that really matters, and Deborah Treisman, Knopf, and, hats off you dear old thing, The New Yorker have done a magnificent job commemorating it.

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He has written regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News