I started reading the New Yorker in the mid-1960s. I loved the cartoons and some of the short stories, especially Donald Barthelme’s loopy tales. I admired John Cheever’s crafted stories…but they are all downbeat. I became a fan of Isaac Bashevis Singer and Cynthia Ozick.
During the 1970s and 1980s I subscribed to the New Yorker erratically–when I got a 6-month inexpensive offer, I’d jump on it…then let it lapse when the full-price offer arrived. Also, it seemed that every doctor’s Waiting Room had copies of the New Yorker so I caught up on issues that way, too.
A Century of Fiction in the New Yorker 1925-2025 is a massive tome: 1125 pages! It includes 78 stories from that 100 years of publishing. Some years are favored with multiple stories, other years…nothing. Some of the famous stories are included: Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” and J. D. Salinger’s “A Perfect Day for Bananafish.” Almost all the famous writers of the century are represented.
I could quibble about the choices Editor Deborah Treisman made. Is “The Ladder” the best V. S. Pritchett story ever published in the New Yorker? I have my doubts. But, all in all, this weighty anthology does capture the morphing of the New Yorker from a humor magazine to a literary standard bearer. Do you read the New Yorker? How many of these 78 stories have you read? GRADE: A
Table Of Contents:
| Introduction — Deborah Treisman | ix |
| “Life Cycle of a Literary Genius” — E. B. White (1926) | 3 |
| “Over the River and Through the Wood” — John O’Hara (1934) | 5 |
| “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” — James Thurber (1939) | 12 |
| “Such a Pretty Day” — Dawn Powell (1939) | 18 |
| “The Weeds” — Mary McCarthy (1944) | 28 |
| “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” — J. D. Salinger (1948) | 51 |
| “Children Are Bored on Sunday” — Jean Stafford (1948) | 64 |
| “Symbols and Signs” — Vladimir Nabokov (1948) | 75 |
| “The Lottery” — Shirley Jackson (1948) | 81 |
| “The Ladder” — V. S. Pritchett (1949) | 90 |
| “The Five-Forty-Eight” — John Cheever (1954) | 104 |
| “The State of Grace” — Harold Brodkey (1954) | 119 |
| “I Live on Your Visits” — Dorothy Parker (1955) | 133 |
| “A Father-to-Be” — Saul Bellow (1955) | 140 |
| “A Summer’s Reading” — Bernard Malamud (1956) | 151 |
| “The Happiest I’ve Been” — John Updike (1959) | 159 |
| “Defender of the Faith” — Philip Roth (1959) | 175 |
| “Where Is the Voice Coming From?” — Eudora Welty (1963) | 205 |
| “The Indian Uprising” — Donald Barthelme (1965) | 211 |
| “The House of the Famous Poet” — Muriel Spark (1966) | 218 |
| “The Cafeteria” — Isaac Bashevis Singer (1968) | 227 |
| “City Lovers” –Nadine Gordimer (1975) | 243 |
| “Voices Lost in Snow” — Mavis Gallant (1976) | 254 |
| “The Book of Sand” — Jorge Luis Borges (1976) | 265 |
| “Father’s Last Escape” — Bruno Schultz (1978) | 270 |
| “The Burning House” — Ann Beattie (1979) | 275 |
| “The Shawl” — Cynthia Ozick (1980) | 290 |
| “The Bookseller” — Elizabeth Hardwick (1980) | 295 |
| “Where I’m Calling From” — Raymond Carver (1982) | 309 |
| “The First American” — Lore Segal (1983) | 325 |
| “The Red Girl” — Jamaica Kincaid (1983) | 341 |
| “Love” — William Maxwell (1983) | 352 |
| “The Way We Live Now” — Susan Sontag (1986) | 356 |
| “Emergency” — Denis Johnson (1991) | 374 |
| “The Pugilist at Rest” — Thom Jones (1991) | 385 |
| “Bullet in the Brain” — Tobias Wolff (1995) | 404 |
| “How to Date a Brown Girl (Black Girl, White Girl, or Halfie)” — Junot Diaz (1995) | 410 |
| “People Like That Are the Only People Here” –Lorrie Moore (1997) | 415 |
| “Brokeback Mountain” — Annie Proulx (1997) | 446 |
| “The Telephone Game” — William Trevor (1998) | 471 |
| “The Third and Final Continent” — Jhumpa Lahiri (1999) | 482 |
| “Drinking Coffee Elsewhere” — ZZ Packer (2000) | 501 |
| “U.F.O. in Kushiro” — Haruki Murakami (2001) | 521 |
| “Seven” — Edwidge Banticat (2001) | 536 |
| “The Courtesy” — John Berger (2002) | 548 |
| “My Father Addresses Me on the Facts of Old Age” — Grace Haley (2002) | 571 |
| “Gallatin Canyon” — Thomas McGuane (2003) | 580 |
| “What You Pawn I Will Redeem” — Sherman Alexie (2003) | 593 |
| “A Rich Man” — Edward P. Jones (2003) | 615 |
| “Chicxulub” — T. Coraghessan Boyle (2004) | 635 |
| “The Plague of Doves” — Louise Erdrich (2004) | 646 |
| “Last Evenings on Earth” — Roberto Bolano (2005) | 660 |
| “Dimension” — Alice Munro (2006) | 681 |
| “Good People” — David Foster Wallace (2007) | 707 |
| “Another Manhattan” — Donald Antrim (2008) | 714 |
| “In the South” — Salman Rushdie (2009) | 735 |
| “Old Wounds” — Edna O’Brien (2009) | 749 |
| “Midnight in Dostoevsky” — Don DeLillo (2009) | 766 |
| “The Other Place” — Mary Gaitskill (2011) | 787 |
| “Going for a Beer” — Robert Coover (2011) | 801 |
| “Tenth of December” — George Saunders (2011) | 804 |
| “What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank” — Nathan Englander (2011) | 829 |
| “Black Box” — Jennifer Egan (2012) | 850 |
| “An Abduction” — Tessa Hadley (2012) | 896 |
| “A Voice in the Night” — Steven Millhauser (2012) | 915 |
| “The Embassy of Cambodia” — Zadie Smith (2013) | 933 |
| “The Christmas Miracle” — Rebecca Curtis (2013) | 956 |
| “Apollo” — Chimamanda Negozi Adichie (2015) | 979 |
| “Cold Little Bird” — Ben Marcus (2015) | 990 |
| “The Midnight Zone” — Lauren Groff (2016) | 1010 |
| “Cat Person” — Kristen Roupenian (2017) | 1021 |
| “Chaunt” — Joy Williams (2018) | 1039 |
| “All Will Be Well” — Yiyun Li (2019) | 1049 |
| “Playing Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain” — Jamil Jan Kochai (2020) | 1060 |
| “Visitor” — Bryan Washington (2020) | 1068 |
| “Cafe Loup” — Ben Lerner (2022) | 1087 |
| “Narrowing Valley” — Jonathan Lethem (2022) | 1102 |
| “Crown Heights North” — Rivka Galchen (2024) | 1111 |
| Acknowledgments | 1121 |
Like you, I’ve been a reader off-and-on since the 1970s. It used to symbolize literary glamour and sophistication. Not sure about now. I’m glad John O’Hara is represented here: he published over 200 short stories in the New Yorker and is responsible for shaping what we now think of as the classic “New Yorker short story”.
I read The New Yorker quite regularly from the late seventies through the early aughts. I had a subscription for at least a decade and then off and on whenever, like you, I could find a good deal but it eventually became too expensive and troublesome to bother. The last few times I checked you couldn’t get a basic year’s subscription but had to sign up for some seemingly random number of months so I said the hell with it. Not a huge loss because I thought the magazine’s attempts at trying to stay culturally revelant increasingly awkward and I’ve never felt so disconnected from American culture as I do now (and it’s not an age thing).
Every now and then I pick up an old copy from the late fifties or middle sixties and I’m just amazed at how good (and thick!) the magazine was back in the day. I’ve seen the book in stores and it is a serious doorstop. Definitely more of a library read though.