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

by Deborah Treisman (Editor), The New Yorker

Edited by The New Yorker 's fiction editor, Deborah Treisman, a celebratory selection from one hundred years of short stories in the magazine which has been the most influential and important showcase for the form and has launched dozens of stellar careers in fiction

There is simply no A-Z like the alphabet of fiction writers who have appeared in the pages of The New Yorker in the last hundred years. The book boasts inarguable classics like Salinger’s “A Perfect Day for Bananafish,” Annie Proulx’s “Brokeback Mountain,” and Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” alongside stunners to be rediscovered. Some stories defined a moment or a now-lost world (Isaac Bashevis Singer’s “The Cafeteria”); others showed us a whole new way fiction could sound and feel (“The Red Girl,” by Jamaica Kincaid).

With this vivid selection, Treisman showcases how our fiction has changed over time, and reminds us that past literary fashions continue to ripple outward in the fiction we love today. What does a Donald Barthelme mean to the craft of short fiction now? What will a Yiyun Li mean to the next generation of readers and writers? This exquisite tour of the form as practiced at its highest level will leap directly into the hearts of listeners of all ages, all stripes, and is a beautiful tribute to the magazine's influence on our literary culture over the last century.

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction, Anthologies, Classics, Audiobook, Modern, Adult Fiction

1153 pages, Kindle Edition

First published February 4, 2025

Reviews

[Beth · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love a huge, best-of compilation of short stories. Some highlights from the first 50 years:
The Weeds, Mary McCarthy (1944) - a woman trying to escape her husband
Symbols and Signs, Nabokov (1948) - visiting a son who is "incurably deranged in his mind"
The Ladder, V.S. Pritchett (1949) - a stepmother, stranded
The Happiest I've Been, Updike (1959) - especially the ending

Then came what I thought of as the "Greatest Hits" portion of the book, which were all re-reads and some of my favorite stories of all time:
Where I'm Calling From, Raymond Carver (1982)
The Way We Live Now, Susan Sontag (1986)
Bullet in the Brain, Tobias Wolff (1995) - they is, they is, they is
Brokeback Mountain, Annie Proulx (1997)

And then some standouts from the last 25 years:
Drinking Coffee Elsewhere, ZZ Packer (2000) - seemed ahead of its time
Dimension, Alice Munro (2006) - Deborah Treisman was not afraid to include some authors who have been cancelled
The Other Place, Mary Gaitskill (2011) - I liked this one against my will. It had a very Joyce Carol Oates vibe, and then I noticed there's no JCO in this collection!
What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank, Nathan Englander (2011) - I had forgotten this one, with its sledgehammer ending
An Abduction, Tessa Hadley (2012)
Cold Little Bird, Ben Marcus (2015)
Cat Person, Kristen Roupenian (2017) - I thought this held up
Café Loup, Ben Lerner (2021) - strong debt to Bullet in the Brain!

[Briana]

Praise the Lord, I'm FINALLY finished with A Century of Fiction in The New Yorker: 1925-2025, edited by Deborah Treisman after two months of reading this book on a daily basis.

I am a big fan of The New Yorker magazine and so many amazing writers have had stories published in here for the past century. This magazine was my entry into the world of the best writers, poets, critics, commentators, photographers, and artists. From here, my interest in books and culture exploded. In 2025, The New Yorker is celebrating 100 years of publication and released two commemorative collections: A Century of Poetry and A Century of Fiction. I bought both of these books and since it was a pretty expensive purchase, I wanted to make sure that I read both of these.

The best part of reading this is the way the short story has changed over a century. I think that American writers are known for revolutionizing the short story format and The New Yorker is one of the major reasons why we have that reputation. Here, there are about 78 stories from writers like J.D. Salinger, Vladimir Nabakov, Shirley Jackson, Dorothy Parker, Philip Roth, John Updike, Jhumpa Lahiri, Zadie Smith, Jorge Luis Borges, Susan Sontag, Junot Diaz, Annie Proulx, Yiyun Li, Mary Gaitskill, Raymond Carver, and countless others. So many icons. So many legends. So many... interesting stories.

I "starred" most of them which meant I found them likable, interesting, and/or engaging enough to immediately revisit. Naturally, because of me binge reading this, it became tiresome to keep trudging through at times but every once in a while there would be a story that pulled me in again. As Treisman mentioned in her introduction, as each decade came, the short story format and topics changed. Something that stood out to me the most was the explanation of the typical (read: white) gaze throughout the decades of radical change. The 20th and early 21st century were periods where this country and the world at large have seen such stark changes but I noticed that the tone of many of these stories maintained that same New Yorker vibe. The stories here were buzzy and interesting enough to show us the style of the time but I didn't find too many that were radically progressive or avant garde. Overall, the selections felt safe which is what I kind of expect from the magazine.

[Tsung · Rating 4 out of 5]

What a stellar ensemble of writers, past and present. Despite the variable quality of stories, it is a great sampler of 78 of the best 20th/21st century writers. The more satisfying stories are self-contained. Some feel like they are incomplete and should part of a longer story. Some rely on an unexpected twist but with varying success. The ones which rely on gimicks or novelty generally fall flat. Some have subject matter that resonates, but some which are unrelatable. Some have excellent prose or storytelling, even if they don't lead anywhere. Favourites in bold.

E. B. White, Life Cycle of a Literary Genius (1926). Odd.
John O'Hara, Over the River and Through the Wood (1934). A gaffe condemns Mr Winfield to moral and reputational hell. The way it builds up, with innocuous interactions and an inchoate interest, makes the blunder more poignant. Hilarious.
James Thurber, The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (1939). Quirky.
Dawn Powell, Such a Pretty Day (1939). American version of My Brillant Friend except with immature, rash, irritating girls.
Mary McCarthy, The Weeds (1944). A garden as a metaphor for a failing marriage. A bit draggy.
J. D. Salinger, A Perfect Day for Bananafish (1948). Too abrupt.
Jean Stafford, Children Are Bored on Sunday (1948). Beautifully written feelgood story. Emma suffers from insecurity of being a rube in the midst of intellectuals. But the supposed divide does not stop her from going with Alfred, alluding to the innocence of children.
Vladimir Nabokov, Symbols and Signs (1948). Obscure.
Shirley Jackson, The Lottery (1948). That is sick!
V. S. Pritchett, The Ladder (1949) A fifteen year old girl and her father deal with his second wife after being abandoned by her mother. Funny, wicked, poignant.
John Cheever, The Five-Forty-Eight (1954). Nice addition to the Shady Hill stories. Tense and gritty.
Harold Brodkey, The State of Grace (1954). Bleak story on the need for and the lack of love.
Dorothy Parker, I Live on Your Visits (1955). Amusing. Interesting how Christopher's mother is so vividly portrayed within one visit.
Saul Bellow, A Father-to-Be (1955). A man with burdens, resentment and resignation.
Bernard Malamud, A Summer’s Reading (1956). Either saying that reading is construed as productivity and/or George is a loafer. In the 1950s unemployment rates were generally low. Since then there have been idle generations.
John Updike, The Happiest I’ve Been (1959). Welcome to adulthood. Alcohol, sexual relationships, independence.
Philip Roth, Defender of the Faith (1959). Grossbart is an American version of Good Soldier Svejk but he earns no sympathy. Good story.
Eudora Welty, Where Is the Voice Coming From? (1963). Difficult read because of the patois. An unusual perspective of a race related killing. But the scary part is this: But I advise ’em to go careful. Ain’t it about time us taxpayers starts to calling the moves? Starts to telling the teachers and the preachers and the judges of our so-called courts how far they can go? Even the President so far, he can’t walk in my house without being invited, like he’s my daddy, just to say whoa. Not yet! Now he can.
Donald Barthelme, The Indian Uprising (1965). Nonsensical, post-modernist.
Muriel Spark, The House of the Famous Poet (1966). Intriguing. Supernatural.
Isaac Bashevis Singer, The Cafeteria (1968). Mystical story of holocaust survivors at a communal eating place.
Nadine Gordimer, City Lovers (1975). A coupling across cultures and social status in the time of apartheid.
Mavis Gallant, Voices Lost in Snow (1976). I'm lost too.
Jorge Luis Borges, The Book of Sand (1976). Short but fascinating story about book with no beginning and no end. Kafkaesque.
Bruno Schulz, Father’s Last Escape (1978). Not much impression.
Ann Beattie, The Burning House (1979). Interesting characters and relationships.
Cynthia Ozick, The Shawl (1980). Unsettling story of a woman and her daughters in a concentration camp. Short but impactful.
Elizabeth Hardwick, The Bookseller (1980). Quaint. Parochial secondhand bookseller, unsuccessful writer, placid boss and observer of minor details.
Raymond Carver, Where I’m Calling From (1982). Quite the raconteur. Inmates at an alcohol detox facility.
Lore Segal, The First American (1983). An interaction between a Viennese Jewess and a older, coloured man.
Jamaica Kincaid, The Red Girl (1983). Coming of age of a young girl with a crush on the Red Girl, with vices, a controlling mother and marbles.
William Maxwell, Love (1983). An entire class having a crush on the pretty young teacher. Its a short, beautiful but sad story.
Susan Sontag, The Way We Live Now (1986). Sounds like AIDS. Too many characters and disparate ideas and reactions.
Denis Johnson, Emergency (1991). Fantastical shennanigans of an emergency room attendant.
Thom Jones, The Pugilist at Rest (1991). Vietnam war, pugilism, seizures and multiple cultural, classical and literary references. A bit too diverse.
Tobias Wolff, Bullet in the Brain (1995). Morbidly funny! Not sure if it can be verified though.
Junot Díaz, How to Date a Brown Girl (Black Girl, White Girl, or Halfie) (1995). I don't understand the dating advice, let alone identify with it, but I can see where its coming from. But its an awful lot of stereotyping.
Lorrie Moore, People Like That Are the Only People Here (1997). This is a complex one. It could be a tirade against the cold professionalism of healthcare or the anxiety and distress of a mother with a sick child or both. A disconcerting mix of fear and apprehension with cynicism and detachment. A narrator, separate from the mother is mentioned, which might explain the different voices. Apparently, based on the author and her son.
Annie Proulx, Brokeback Mountain (1997). Aren't cowboys supposed to be macho? Oh. There's the cowboy from the Village People. Nicely written.
William Trevor, The Telephone Game (1998). On the eve of his wedding with Liese, he plays a party game, making a prank call to an elderly lady but the situation goes beyond his control. It exposes how different the couple are. Tense and thought provoking. And Liese wondered why it was that passing incidents seemed more significant in people's lives and their relationships than the enmity or amity of nations.
Jhumpa Lahiri, The Third and Final Continent (1999). A charming, sentimental and humourous story which also appears in Interpreter of Maladies. A gentleman uproots himself from India, to London, then to Boston in 1969, to work in the library at MIT. His migration is a small achievement, but he compares it with the astronauts landing on the moon. His first accommodation in Boston is a room rented from a cantankerous, feisty 103 year old lady, who leaves a lasting impression on him. He is soon joined by his arranged bride. It is this inveterate old lady who brings them closer together. Marvellous!
ZZ Packer, Drinking Coffee Elsewhere (2000). A coloured girl and a white girl. Almost or not?
Haruki Murakami, U.F.O. in Kushiro (2001). How bizarre!
Edwidge Danticat, Seven (2001). The loneliness of migration, the joy of reunion and the fragility of relationships.
John Berger, The Courtesy (2002). Supernatural. Narrator interacts with his dead mother.
Grace Paley, My Father Addresses Me on the Facts of Old Age (2002). Unsolicited advice from her father on various issues.
Thomas McGuane, Gallatin Canyon (2003). Odd. A couple drive to Idaho for a business deal. The man scuttles the sale and they get tailgated on their way back.
Sherman Alexie, What You Pawn I Will Redeem (2003). This is hysterical! Jackson Jackson, an intractable, alcoholic Spokane Indian in Seattle sets out to redeem his grandmother's regalia from a pawn shop. He is mischevious, generous and carefree. He encounters people from different races and backgrounds. Sometimes he makes money, only to lose or spend it again. Its a funny tale.
Edward P. Jones, A Rich Man (2003). A dirty old man.
T. Coraghessan Boyle, Chicxulub (2004). A cataclysmic meteor strike is juxtaposed with a daughter hit by a car. Clumsy mix.
Louise Erdrich, The Plague of Doves (2004). Different stories within a story.
Roberto Bolaño, Last Evenings on Earth (2005). Brilliant! On the surface, it is unrefined with its minimalist style and terse sentences, but the storytelling is topnotch. It has smoldering tension throughout as B and his father go on a holiday to Acapulco. It seems like a normal trip but it keeps teasing that something is about to go wrong.
Alice Munro, Dimension (2006). Not sure which direction the story is taking. Bad choices, commitment, renewal, comfort?
David Foster Wallace, Good People (2007). An unplanned pregnacy with religious overtones. A single, plodding scenario which is too stretched out.
Donald Antrim, Another Manhattan (2008). Bipolar Jim buying flowers to make it up to his wife. He is having an affair with the wife of his wife's lover. Isn't it called swinging? Drama.
Salman Rushdie, In the South (2009). Two elderly gentleman with vastly different backgrounds enjoy their neighbourly bonding. Nicely done.
Edna O'Brien, Old Wounds (2009). Edward, an older cousin, attempts reconciliation with the narrator. In the wake of loss and family feuds, there is companionship, nostalgia, guilt, regret, resentment. This story touches a nerve.
Don DeLillo, Midnight in Dostoevsky (2009). Anorak or parka? Two students have a dialectical discussion which does not lead any where.
Mary Gaitskill, The Other Place (2011). Morbid obsession with guns, violence and murder.
Robert Coover, Going for a Beer (2011). Drunken, rudderless, directionless existence.
George Saunders, Tenth of December (2011). Random people, events, even words. Messy.
Nathan Englander, What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank (2011). A pair of Jewish couples, one orthodox and one liberal, meet up and reminisce. Primarily reflecting Jewish and American culture. Does not resonate.
Jennifer Egan, Black Box (2012). Black box of a female cyborg going undercover in some human trafficking(?) organization. The story is told as instructions. Very gimicky. No substance.
Tessa Hadley, An Abduction (2012). Good story. A fifteen year old girl gets picked up by older boys and stays with them overnight, unbeknownst to her mother, in a coming of age story. Its interesting how she remembers it in detail but her first sexual partner does not.
Steven Millhauser, A Voice in the Night (2012). Three overlapping stories, all based on the first, a retelling of the call of Samuel in the bible. The second is an impressionable Jewish boy who feels the burden of the the call, unwilling to give up on what he is familiar with. The third is the same boy now an old man, wrestling with insomnia and his Jewish background. Perhaps the author's own struggles.
Zadie Smith, The Embassy of Cambodia (2013). Feels incomplete but nicely written. Fatou is a survivor, having endured the long, arduous journey from Ivory Coast to England. Her sneaky trips past the oddly located Cambodian Embassy to the health club are simple in comparison. She wonders if she is just a slave to her employers the Derawals. I wonder where she goes next, and how she gets on with Andrew.
Rebecca Curtis, The Christmas Miracle (2013). Bizzarre.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Apollo (2015). Nice story. It starts off with the narrator's parents become more superstitious and irrational in old age. The "new childhood of old age" as it were. The focus then swings around to Okenwa's childhood. As an only child, Okenwa looks up to houseboy Raphael as a role model. After an episode of apollo or conjunctivitis, admiration turns to jealousy, betrayal and guilt.
Ben Marcus, Cold Little Bird (2015). Painful read. A 10 year old Jewish boy turns against his Jewish parents with anti-Semitic accusations.
Lauren Groff, The Midnight Zone (2016). A mother falls, hits her head and waits for her husband to return. Weird.
Kristen Roupenian, Cat Person (2017). A sophomore has a brief fling with a 34 year old.
Joy Williams, Chaunt (2018). Odd. A woman is in a rest home after her son is struck and killed by a driver coming from Chaunt.
Yiyun Li, All Will Be Well (2019). Communicating with a lost love and communicating with children.
Jamil Jan Kochai, Playing Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain (2020). Curious mix of the video game with the narrator's family.
Bryan Washington, Visitor (2020). A gay man is visited by his late, closeted gay father's lover. Interesting interactions.
Ben Lerner, Café Loup (2022). Hey! This is just like Bullet in the Brain (1995) except that it is by choking.
Jonathan Lethem, Narrowing Valley (2022). This one makes no sense at all.
Rivka Galchen, Crown Heights North (2024). Thoughts of another dead person.

[n]

I DID IT!!! it took me eight months and several holds on libby, but i did it!!!

my favourite stories, in order of publication (* for rereads, ☆ for the ones i loved best):

- mary mccarthy, the weeds
- jd salinger, a perfect day for bananafish* ☆
- shirley jackson, the lottery* ☆
- bruno schulz, father's last escape
- raymond carver, where i'm calling from*
- susan sontag, the way we live now ☆
- tobias wolff, bullet in the brain
- annie proulx, brokeback mountain
- zz packer, drinking coffee elsewhere ☆
- sherman alexie, what you pawn i will redeem ☆
- t. coraghessan boyle, chicxulub
- don delillo, midnight in dostoevsky
- mary gaitskill, the other place
- robert coover, going for a beer ☆
- jennifer egan, black box*
- tessa hadley, an abduction ☆
- lauren groff, the midnight zone*
- jonathan lethem, narrowing valley ☆

[Romulus · Rating 5 out of 5]

Te pięć gwiazdek jest przede wszystkim dla mnie. Za wytrwałość. Kiedy zaczynałem nie wierzyłem, że dam radę. I były kryzysy zakończone kartkowaniem: pokonywał mnie język (zbyt trudny) i/albo treść. Ale to wydarzyło się gdzieś w okolicach połowy - a wtedy stawka już była wysoka. Nie byłoby wytrwałości gdyby nie najważniejsza cecha, która przydaje się w całym moim życiu: systematyczność. I dyscyplina. Reszta to przypisy. Zatem: brawo ja. 😀

Nie będę się mądrzył na temat treści. Jedyne co łączyło teksty z tego zbioru to fakt, że debiutowały w The New Yorker. Czy są charakterystyczne dla pisma lub mówią coś o amerykańskiej literaturze ostatnich stu lat? Nie mam zielonego pojęcia.

Na pewno ta książka przywróciła mi chęć na czytanie po angielsku. Dwie kolejne, krótsze i łatwiejsze czekają w kolejce.

[Jiapei Chen]

I've always been a fan of the New Yorker - from its expansive reporter-at-large pieces (which my high school has based a writing assignment on) to its whimsical comics. So when I saw that there is a new anthology celebrating the past 100 years of fiction short stories published in the magazine, I didn't hesitate to obtain a copy. I was so pumped when I heard the loud thud outside my apartment door - a long-awaited sign that an Amazon delivery with this book has been dropped. I can't wait to start!!! The plan is to read 1-2 stories a week, depending on the length.

Introduction
Editor Deborah Treisman roughly went over what the stories in each decade were like in the New Yorker. Apparently the magazine started as a satire, then moved to more serious pieces. Stories seem to have morphed from simple sketches and moral tales, to more experimental pacing and voices. It looks like there is a general avoidance of autobiographical stories, which is interesting to me, since auto-fiction is all the rage these days.

Life Cycle of a Literary Genius - E. B. White (1926)
I can see this as a stand-up bit in the 1920s..? It reads like satire, but I'm not sure of what lol.

Over the River and Through the Wood - John O'Hara (1934)
A sketch of an old man past his prime days, perhaps feeling overtaken by the young generations - his daughter's family and his granddaughter's friends. There were some whiffs of strained family relations, but details were lacking. The end scene of the old man running into the nude girl was sort of abrupt - I can only interpret it as a metaphor of how the old man felt like he was intruding the young uns' lives and how he was not wanted/needed anymore.

The Secret Life of Walter Mitty - James Thurber (1939)
If I'm not mistaken, this was made into a movie with Ben Stiller? At least with the same title.

Such a Pretty Day - Dawn Powell (1939)

[Jeff · Rating 5 out of 5]

It might well be that two events happened in the late aughts that changed my reading habits. The first of which was a decision, mostly on a whim, to try to read some of the classics I had been assigned in high school and not really done. Cliff’s notes versions, summaries, had been the alternative to doing the work. Starting with Moby Dick, The Odyssey, and some Shakespeare, before much time had passed I was knee deep in Fitzgerald and Faulkner.

The second event was I picked up The New Yorker. While its long form articles are always interesting it was its weekly fiction pieces that led me down paths I would have never known about.

In a country with myriad problems and endless changes that have hurt the central common experience is it possible that the loss of reading, the centrality of the weekly magazine becoming a relic, is one of the more telling examples of that decline.

I don’t know. Above my pay grade as they say. A dissertation could be, and I’m sure many have been, written about the loss of both a high and low brow common culture in this country as we sink further and further into our silos of polarization. The decline of a common reading experience is inevitably just one canary in the coal mine.

Because I have read the magazine faithfully now for twenty years and done deep dives in the archives and anthologies as well I’ve read many of these stories before. No matter, a great story always provides a new discovery on each read.

I plan to write about these, highlighting the most important.

“Over the River and Thru the Woods” by John O’Hara is from 1934. A grandfather travels with his granddaughter and her friends to his daughter’s summer home. Once there enlivened by their company, a knock on a door, a misheard response, and he fears he will be labeled a dirty old man for the rest of his days.

A couple great lines; “Mr. Winfield instantly knew that this was the end of any worthwhile life he had left” and “There was all the time in the world, too much of it, for him.”

“The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” by James Thurber has never been a favorite of mine and “Such A Pretty Day” by Dawn Powell both appear from 1939. While new to me, the latter story did not appeal. The Weeds” by Mary McCarthy from 1944 did not have great appeal as we see a woman’s garden keep her from leaving her husband and it’s eventual death in her absence signifying all that he has lost.

“A Perfect Day For Bananafish” by JD Salinger : From 1948, published in his Nine Stories collection I’ve read this story before. Interestingly my notes on an earlier reading call it “unsettling” and despite its legendary status it being lesser than a couple of other stories in the set. Muriel Glass is in Florida with her husband. Seymour has not been the same since returning from the war. Talking on the phone her Mother tells her how concerned she is for Muriel. Muriel insists that he is or will be fine, that she has nothing to fear. Seymour meanwhile is on the beach, playing with a young girl in the water. When that ends he returns to his room where Muriel lies napping,
places his service pistol against his temple, and fires.

“Children Are Bored On Sunday” by Jean Stafford: This 1948 story I had read this before and thought it Ok, on this reread I found it nothing special.

“Symbols and Signs” by Nabakov, also from 1948 is a strong piece. A couple, old for their age are going to visit their mentally ill son. We get a backstory and then, a hope for the future, marred by a consistently ringing wrong number phone call.

The Lottery by Shirley Jackson : What more can be said. A classic. It’s a shame you only get to read it once without knowing.

The Ladder by V.S. Pritchett : From 1949 a young girl returns from her boarding school to se her father and his new wife. She had known the woman before as his secretary, she dislikes her in this role. The house is being remodeled with the stairs being moved as part of it. Currently the only way upstairs is via a ladder.

The Five-Forty-Eight by John Cheever : from 1954 and its mores a businessman has a nervous, mousy woman sent to him by the secretarial pool. After sleeping with her in her tiny cramped apartment one day he has her fired the next. He does not expect repercussions but there certainly are some. In this story there is significant passage given to the smells of the train he takes home on a wet night. “The car smelled like some dismal classroom….(he) felt he might never escape the smell of heat and wet clothing and the dimness of the light.”

I, myself, can still smell both the inside of a school bus on a wet day, as well the downstairs first grade lunchroom. It had the smell of recent paint, the smells from the kitchen, and the dank smell of underground

The State of Grace by Harold Brodkey: A fairly nondescript story from 1954. Tinged also with physical descriptions of memory such as. “ There is a certain shade of red brick, a dark, almost melodious, red, somber, and riddled with blue, that is my childhood in St. Louis that one shade of red brick and green foliage is St. Louis in the summer. The winter is just a gray sky and a crowded school bus and the wet footprints on the brown linoleum floor at the school, and that brick and a pale sky is spring.”

I Live On Your Visits by Dorothy Parker : From 1955 a young man is visiting his Mother. She is aggrieved, maudlin. His father now remarried and happy, she is bitter and talks in tones and ways that he calls “that way.” I so know people just like the Mother.

A Father To Be by Saul Bellow: Story follows a man, a thirty year old chemist on his way to see his fiance for Sunday dinner. She is beautiful, elegant, and refined. He supports her financially, as well as his elderly mother and younger brother. Seeing a man on the subway that reminds of his soon to be father in law he realizes this might be what his son will look like forty years hence. It is not a good thought.

A Summer’s Reading by Bernard Malamud : From 1956, George is 20, living in the city and embarrassed. He quit school without thinking and is too proud to admit his mistake. He can’t find a job. Out walking one night he tells a neighbor man he is putting his period of fallow employment to good use, reading some of the great books. And, even though he isn’t, word gets around and he feels the esteem due him from his pronouncement. All lies come back to roost.

The Happiest I’ve Been by John Updike : A 1959 Olinger story about a young man leaving Christmas break early to visit his girlfriend in Chicago. Riding with his old school chum he is asked to stop at an early NYEve party. The party feels nostalgic and sad as they are all the people he grew up with, now two years out into their adult life but little changed. An interesting comment from the narrator posits he is different due to having grandparents live with him. “He had an awareness of midnight coughs and bedside commodes that awaited most men.”

Defender of the Faith by Philip Roth : Early story from his first collection. Nathan Marx has shipped stateside after the end of the war in Europe and will finish his stint as a training officer. Once there a young recruit attempts to use their mutual Jewishness to his advantage. Strong story

Where Is the Voice Coming From by Eudora Welty : on the night Medgar Evers was shot in 1963 both he and Welty lived in Jackson, Mississippi. She wrote this story that night putting herself in the mind of an assassin. One line stood out, the killer in his monologue thinks to himself “Ain’t it about time us taxpayers start to calling the moves? Starts to telling the teachers and the preachers and the judges of our so called courts how far they can go.” That is something you can read today, right now, from many sources.

Indian Uprising by Donald Barthelme had no input for me.

The House of the Famous Poet by Muriel Spark : Didn’t do much for me either, an odd premise of an “abstract funeral.”

The Cafeteria by Isaac Bashevis Singer: Narrsted by a Jewish writer, he describes his interactions over the years with a woman in her thirties, a couple of decades younger get than him. An interesting comparison is made about old people in a nursing home. One dies and those still living look at each other and wonder “Who’s next?” He compares this to a scene in a film about Africa. A lion attacks a herd of zebras and kills one. The frightened zebras run for a while and then they stop and start to graze again. Do they have a choice? Death, and in this case, lions are both random and inevitable

City Lovers by Nadine Gordimer : An Austrian mineralogist working in South Africa develops a slow growing relationship with a light skinned ( not black he is sure to tell himself) young woman until they fall afoul of tne race police and are charged with the crime of the morals code

Voices Lost in Snow by Mavis Gallant : Narrator recounts her youth in the land of “Because I Say So” from her parents. Her mother, her father, and alluded affair. Gorgeous writing

The Book of Sand by Jorge Luis Borges : From 1976 it seems surely a better story could have been chosen. A haunted book. Borges has so much better.

Father’s Last Escape by Bruno Schultz : From 1978, translated from Polish another weak entry. Set in the war but only by inference, our narrator speaks of his father repeatedly dying, ending by a metamorphosis into a crab. I surely did not get the symbolism
intended

The Burning House by Ann Beattie : A woman tells of an evening at home with her husband, her husbands client who runs an art gallery, her husbands gay brother and her husbands former college advisor. Beneath all this she fields calls from her lover and wonders if her husband is leaving her for his own.

The Shawl by Cynthia Ozick : Five pages. Just five pages. Absolute amazingness. Sheer terror. Rosa is a woman in the camps with a small infant. She hides the infant in her shawl. The guards don’t know. Only she, and Stella, a fourteen year old, almost feral, girl know of the baby, Magda’s existence. When Stella pulls the shawl from the baby in her own cold in the night it sets off a chain of events that ends in absolute horror.

The Bookseller by Elizabeth Hardwick : I like this story, would have liked to like it more. A character study of a Roger, a man who runs a bookstore called The Pleiade in the theatre district of the city.

Where I’m Calling From by Raymond Carver : I will always read a Carver story, even one I’ve read many times such as this. Recounts a man in a rehab facility for alcohol. Trying to beat it. He recounts the tales of other drunks. One, notable, says he only blacks out when they put ice in his drinks, otherwise he’s fine. Can we not just see people we know saying that same sort of excuse

The First American by Lore Segal : I read this recently online upon the authors death. An excellent piece about a Jewish refugee to America taking a train trip out west.

The Red Girl by Jamaica Kincaid : Excellent story told of a young girl in Antigua getting in trouble with her Mother. Playing marbles, stealing penny’s and playing with a girl her Mother thinks poorly of. Describes the feeling of childhood friendship very well.

Love by William Maxwell : Short piece describes a young woman teaching a small fifth grade class in rural England. When she is out sick and then the students are told she won’t return two boys, including the narrator, visiting her home in a farmhouse outside of town to see her, only to be shocked to see her close to death from tuberculosis. A great line : the angel who watches over little boys who know, but they can’t say it saw to it that we didn’t touch anything. As she was so stricken with the disease they were indeed lucky.

The Way We Live Now by Susan Sontag and Emergency by Denis Johnson are two stories I had read and wrote about from a different anthology very recently

The Pugilist At Rest by Thom Jones : Fantastic story follows a man from boot camp to Vietnam. His troop is ambushed and wiped out, all but him. A cohort of his who he had met in training played the hero in that firefight, saving him before dying. He won medals, accepting credit where none was due. He did three tours ending up state side with seizures and epilepsy from repeated head trauma

Tobias Wolff’s “Bullet in the Brain,” and People Like That Are The Only People Here by Lorrie Moore ( see my review of her Modern Library collection) are both fantastic stories I’ve read earlier. Both brutal in different ways

How To Date A Brown Girl, Black Girl, White Girl, or Hallie by Junot Diaz : Interesting, somewhat crude story has the narrator a high school age Dominican telling what happens when you bring certain girls over to seduce. His verdict, neighborhood girls are tougher, unpredictable, white girls slumming from the suburbs almost always give it up.

Brokeback Mountain by Annie Proulx: I had read this before but really read it this time. Take out the sex or at least the nature of it if it makes you uncomfortable, the brilliance of the writing here is immense. The conversations the two have about the electrity between them, even later in life, the knowing the disaster it can and likely will lead to, and in the end being powerless to stop it. Addicts of all kind, not just to a dangerous love, will relate. A repeated line in the story that equates to most anything “ If you can’t fix it you’ve got to stand it”

The Telephone Game by William Trevor : Tony and Liese are getting married. Liese, who is German, has much of her friends and family in. The night before the wedding Tony introduces everyone to a prank telephone game he and his friends played at uni. When it goes wrong, or gives the appearance that it might have gone wrong, the couple spend their last night before the wedding questioning their choice of partner.

The Third and Final Continent by Jhumpa Lahiri : Just a perfect story. Narrated by an Indian man who tells his story of emigrating to England in 1964, then after five years in school he returns home to his arranged marriage and then takes a job at MIT at the library. The story primarily tells of his first months in America and his first landlord, a 103 year old woman. We also see his beginnings of his marriage, their struggles and the eventual blossoming of their lives. A “splendid”story( if you read the story you will understand this sentence.

Drinking Coffee Elsewhere by ZZ Packer: Story follows a young black woman in her first year at Yale. She struggles to fit in, is antisocial, and makes a comment about guns that gets her weekly visits with a shrink. She also is most definitely “NOT” attracted to the chunky “OUT” white girl that becomes her only friend.

UFO in Kushiro by Haruki Marakami : Story follows a fairly successful electronics salesman in the week after his wife left him.

Seven by Edwidge Danticat : Story follows a Haitian man and woman, married seven years earlier right before he left for the states. It had taken him this long to get a green card. Now she has arrived and they both are happy and scared and full of questions about what they should reveal of the last seven years.

The Courtesy by John Berger : Superb story about a man, older now, who runs into his long dead mother in Lisbon. Some beautiful writing here about memory as an an adult. Amidst the much to savour here is a quote from the narrators mother about change begetting change :

“ we – us – we are all here. Just as you and the living are here – to repair a little of what was broken. This is why we occurred. Came to be. Don’t forget, she said one thing repaired changes 1000 others! The dog down there, she remarked,is on too short a chain. Change it, lengthen it. Then he’ll be able to reach the shade, and he’ll lie down and stop barking. And the silence will remind the mother that she wanted a canary in a cage in the kitchen. And when the canary sings, she’ll do more ironing. And the father‘s shoulders in a freshly iron shirt will take less when he goes to work. And so when he comes home, he’ll sometimes joke, as he wants dead, with his teenage daughter. And the daughter will change her mind and decide, exceptionally, to bring her lover home one evening. And on another evening, the father will propose to the young man that they go fishing.”

Stories by Grace Paley and Thomas Mcguane and Alice Munro that I’ve read and wrote on.

What You Pawn I Will Redeem by Sherman Alexie: I’ve read this before, a few times, but on a revisit it’s even better. Just a great story with much going on. The money he can’t keep, the hopelessness, and yet the generosity he has for others. No hoarding. The constant in and out of characters in his life with the frequent mentions of their later deaths, it really illustrates the experience

A Rich Man by Edward Jones was completely new to me. A strong story, sad. An elderly man, a black man, and his wife move into a senior residency. He cheats with many women in the complex. They become estranged, roommates and not friendly ones, for ten years. After she dies he starts seeing younger women and his life disintegrates from there.

Chicxulub by TC Boyle : Just an immense story. The narrator compares life on earth to the randomness of the universe. Specifically meteors that hit earth including the civilization killers like the meteor in the title that hits earth. Comparing those to his teenage daughter walking home one night and getting hit by a car. It illustrates his point perfectly. Top story.

The Plague of Doves by Louise Erdrich: An author I need to read more of. Narrator tells of his great grandfathers experience with doves that settled on their settlement in the late 1800’s. He tells of the stories told him in his boyhood by the man, his Mooshum, when his father took the dials off the tv. Specifically the dove infestation and how he met his wife. Very good

Last Evenings On Earth by Roberto Bolano : Strong story follows a twenty something man and his forty something father as they travel to Acapulco from where they live in Mexico City for a vacation. Throughout it all the son is the calmer, the more responsible, trying to keep their activities safe, until finally, as seems inevitable, trouble comes

Good People by David Foster Wallace : Shows two young people, a couple, sitting on a picnic table by the river grappling with a problem. The girl is pregnant. They both are good, apparently Christian conservative people. He wants the baby gone, he does not love her, he can admit that. The story is in his head while he waits for the girl to advise if she can go thru with the appointment they’ve made at the clinic.

Another Manhattan by Donald Antrim: An author I’ve had trouble appreciating, this story is sadly excellent. Two couples in NYC. Both sets have been having affairs with their opposite. This has become very complicated by the mental illness and suicide attempts of one gentleman. A sadly funny episode of cell phone tag and call waiting. Good, but hard to describe. Effective portrayal of an imperfect person with mental illness

In the South by Salmon Rushdie : Wonderful story about two 81 year old men who live next to each other in an apartment building in the south of India. They could not be more different, they argue constantly, yet thee companionship they get from each other is critical. Much of their conversations take place on their verandas which adjoin each other. When one dies the other is left to contemplate the distinction “Death and life we’re just adjacent verandas. He stood one one of them as always, while on the other, continuing their tradition of many years, was the other

Old Wounds by Edna O’Brien : A lovely but slightly confusing story told by an older woman of her putting aside a long standing family quarrel with her Mothers sisters family that harkens back to the time of her childhood.

Review is at max.

[Elizabeth · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read 8 stories and I liked all of the ones I read that's why I read them. So if you think this collection is bad you have bad taste lmao if you don't like a story just move on and read another one.

E. B. White, "Life Cycle of a Literary Genius" - short and punchy

Junot Diaz, "How to Date a Brown Girl (Black Girl, White Girl, or Halfie) - love me some incel racism, yt ppl may be uncomfortable but the world don't revolve around you. I like ppl stereotyping others cuz let's be real that's how we think

Annie Proulx, "Brokeback Mountain" - no words needed, one of the GOATs, LeBron of this book, Proulx's insight is out of this world, love the vulnerability, finally a woman who can write male gays well. So much insight and perfect lines

Haruki Murakami, "U.F.O in Kushiro" - poignant and depressing, how I like it

Robert Coover, "Going for a Beer" - poignant AND depressing AND short AND punchy

Kristen Roupenian, "Cat Person" - conveyed the vibe so well I felt revolted and almost threw up in the middle, I love stories about dumb hookups and decisions that are probably bad but also have little impact on anything, so we should make more of those decisions

Yiyun Li, "All Will Be Well" - I only knew her from her sons' suicides but SO FUCKING GOOD, Steph Curry, like how quotidienne it was and Asian American but not the weird sweet consumerist type

Bryan Washington, "Visitor" - not out of this world but a nice-in-this-world-amazing. Like the use of the term "fuck buddy," thought that was just a TikTok thing lol. Chill read.

[jz]

life cycle of a literary genius, e.b. white
- the first e.b. white work i've read in a decade! brief, cheeky.
- favorite part: "...encouraged by success..."

over the river and through the wood, john o'hara
- vignette of a man so weak in mind and spirit you can't help but feel a little sorry for him. really liked this one for some reason
- favorite line: "mr. winfield instantly knew that this was the end of any worthwhile life he had left."

the secret life of walter mitty, james thurber
- i feel like if i read this when it was published it would've blown my mind. funny portrait of the rich internal life of an otherwise bumbling 妻管严 doctor.
- favorite part: "...puppies bark for it..."

such a pretty day, dawn powell
- disturbing. also—not a single detail wasted. chock full of commentary on the lives of poorer young women, the social pressures they face, their powerlessness once they give into that social pressure, the festering tension between socioeconomic classes, etc.
- favorite part: the stopper

the weeds, mary mccarthy
- such decadent prose!

[Phil reading_fastandslow · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fantastic collection / education. I have discovered so many new authors through this anthology! However, I am disappointed that there are only 4 stories from the 1960s, against 18 stories from 2000-2010.

[Reagan Ferris · Rating 4 out of 5]

I usually don’t read short stories so this was a really great dive into the genre. I really enjoyed “The Midnight Zone,” “Father’s Last Escape,” “Children Are Bored on Sunday,” “Life Cycle of a Literary Genius,” “People Like That Are The Only People Here.” I wonder how the stories were selected.

[Morgan Eigel · Rating 3 out of 5]

I don’t want this on my feed anymore so I’ll just say I finished it (I read less than half but that was still like 400 pages)

Appreciated 20s-30s, loved 40s-60s (future masters degree 🤔🤔🤨🤨🧐🤨🧐), stopped caring at 70s and dropped at 90s

[Basundhara Mukherjee · Rating 5 out of 5]

Such a unique and wonderful collection!

[Demetri · Rating 4 out of 5]

“A Century of Fiction in The New Yorker: 1925–2025” announces its ambition without raising its voice. The book is large, yes, and its table of contents reads like a roll call that could double as a map of twentieth- and twenty-first-century Anglophone literature. But the volume’s real proposition is quieter and more interesting: that a magazine’s fiction pages, read in sequence across a hundred years, can operate as a time-lapse of taste. Not taste as fashion, exactly, but taste as permission – what a story is allowed to be, what it is expected to conceal, what it is permitted to say plainly, and what it must learn to suggest.

Deborah Treisman, the magazine’s longtime fiction editor, curates seventy-eight stories in chronological order, beginning in the twenties and arriving in the early twenty-twenties, with the calm authority of someone who has spent years reading unsolicited work and deciding, sentence by sentence, what belongs. Her introduction is candid about limits and candid, too, about the contradictions that shape such a project: the tug between “best” and “representative,” the gravitational pull of famous titles, the question of how time ratifies craft, the awkward fact that a century does not behave like a single aesthetic unit. The collection is offered less as a verdict than as a route – signposts, detours, scenic overlooks – a way of seeing the magazine’s fiction tradition as something that changes shape even as it remains recognizably itself.

Read straight through, the anthology demonstrates how a publication builds an aesthetic by repetition. The earliest pieces carry the magazine’s original atmosphere: urbane, compressed, socially alert, often hovering near humor even when the subject is not funny. Many behave like sketches in the best sense – small rooms in which a few gestures, a few lines of dialogue, and a single social miscalculation reveal an entire class system. The writing is not minimal, but it is economical. It distrusts elaborate machinery and prefers the pleasures of recognition: a sharply chosen detail that is at once decorative and diagnostic, a sentence that seems to have been honed until it can do two jobs at once.

In those early decades, the fiction often feels like an extension of the magazine’s public persona: metropolitan, quick, faintly superior, but also amused by its own superiority. What startles a modern reader is how swiftly these stories establish their social coordinates. There is little appetite for throat-clearing. A scene begins, and the reader is expected to keep pace. The compression is not only stylistic. It is moral. A short story, in this mode, is a social instrument: it measures what a person can say in a room, what a person cannot say in a room, and what the room itself will pretend not to notice.

Then the forties arrive with their sharper edges. In these selections, the magazine seems to learn how to stage moral pressure without sermonizing, how to let a premise bite, how to sharpen dialogue until it sounds like conversation and judgment at once. Read in a cluster, the work from this period has an unsettling efficiency. It sets up a world that appears stable and even quaint, then demonstrates – with a calmness that feels almost courteous – how quickly stability can turn into ritual, conformity, punishment, panic, and the cruelty of consensus. The violence, when it comes, often feels less like an intrusion than like a revelation: the story has been showing you the conditions for it all along.

The fifties refine a different intensity: emotional indirection practiced with extraordinary precision. Here the familiar idea of a “New Yorker story” comes into focus, but rereading the decade now reveals something subtler than stereotype. The restraint is not a matter of polite vagueness. It is physical. Desire is shown in posture and phrasing, betrayal in what is over-explained, sorrow in a room’s furniture and the way light falls across it. The prose can be luxuriant in its attentiveness to objects, but the luxury is purposeful: it creates a negative space in which feeling is present without being named. Endings, at their best, do not solve so much as reframe. A final beat shifts the pressure in the room; the reader discovers what the story has really been about; the page goes quiet in a way that is not emptiness but aftershock.

This is the anthology at its most persuasive about craft as an ethical stance. To write with such precision is to take the reader seriously. The reader is not instructed how to feel. The reader is placed inside a carefully built environment and asked to notice what matters. Even the quietest of these stories carry a kind of nerve. They do not rely on spectacle. Their drama is the tension between what is known and what is admitted, between the life a character is living and the life that life has been quietly replacing.

If the anthology were only a monument to that mode, it would feel like a museum whose walls have been painted the same color for a century. One of the book’s pleasures is how often it refuses a single definition of the magazine’s literary brand. The sixties and seventies introduce a deliberate messiness: fiction becomes more willing to wander, to allow a scene to accumulate rather than resolve, to treat the narrative line not as a rail but as a rope bridge. The time-lapse effect becomes vivid here. You can feel the magazine learning new appetites – for fragmentation, for tonal risk, for the pleasure of disjunction.

The collection also makes room, in these decades, for strangeness that is not ornamental. The absurd and the fantastical appear less as escape than as method. A story may fracture into collage, may refuse a single stable voice, may let satire and dread share the same sentence. These pieces argue, implicitly, that realism is not the only path to truth. Sometimes the world is best represented by a form that admits how incoherent the world has become.

This is also where the anthology begins to register a widening of who gets to speak and how. The roster becomes more international, but the deeper change is tonal and rhetorical. Voices appear that sound less like inherited literary diction and more like lived speech – comic, abrasive, intimate, unpolished by design. The anthology makes room for narrators who do not posture as neutral observers, for stories that address you directly, for sensibilities that refuse to translate themselves into an older decorum before they can be heard. The effect is not merely diversity as a social good, though it is that; it is diversity as an artistic expansion of what counts as interesting on the page, what counts as a sentence worth reading.

By the eighties and nineties, old constraints loosen in multiple directions at once. Language becomes more permissive and more elastic. Stories begin to behave like mini-novels, capable of holding decades inside a handful of pages, capable of shifting viewpoint or time without apology, capable of ending far from where they began. Yet the anthology also preserves the counter-impulse: the power of plain sentences, the moral force of understatement, the way a story can be built from a handful of concrete facts and still feel enormous. Read together, these decades correct an easy assumption that literary history is a story of increasing complexity. Complexity is one option. Compression remains another. What changes is the range of what the magazine will allow to coexist under one masthead.

The contemporary selections sharpen the point by showing how the surfaces themselves have changed. The world of devices, apps, protocols, scripts, and algorithmic selfhood enters the fiction not merely as theme but as structure. Some pieces arrive in numbered segments that feel like dispatches or directives; others unfold through the awkward choreography of messages, online flirtation, and the private theater of a mind trained by screens. Yet the best of these stories resist the easy cliché that technology makes us shallow. Instead they show how new surfaces produce new forms of intimacy and new forms of loneliness, new ways to perform the self and new ways to lose the self. If the anthology’s early stories often treat society as a room, the late stories treat society as a network – still crowded, still judgmental, still full of misreadings, but now operating at a different speed.

What emerges, across the century, is not a single narrative of progress but an education in the short story’s adaptability. The anthology refuses the idea that fiction moves in a straight line from “simple” to “complex” or from “old-fashioned” to “modern.” It loops and doubles back. It revisits old problems with new instruments. It discovers, again and again, that the most durable story engines are not plot devices but pressures: shame, desire, fear, pride, loneliness, tenderness. A century of stylistic change becomes, in this view, a century of new ways to place a human being under pressure and then listen carefully to what that pressure makes audible.

A book like this inevitably prompts the reader to think about institutions. The magazine is not just a venue; it is a taste-making machine, and this anthology lets you glimpse its gears. One gear is editorial patience: a preference for stories that reveal themselves by implication rather than declaration, that trust the reader to assemble meaning from what is omitted. Another is a faith in craft: even the wildest pieces tend to be deliberate at the sentence level, as if freedom of form has been purchased through control of texture. The magazine’s famous polish is here, certainly, but so is its counter-tradition of jaggedness, refusal, and risk. One of the anthology’s subtler pleasures is the friction between those impulses: perfection beside audacity, elegance beside abrasion.

The anthology also reminds you that the boundary between fiction and the magazine’s other modes has never been entirely stable. Part of the pleasure of reading these stories in sequence is noticing how narrative techniques migrate across categories: the reportorial eye inside a domestic scene, the essayistic aside inside a character portrait, the casual authority of a voice that seems to know more than it claims. The effect is not confusion so much as texture. The book suggests a publication that has long preferred to let technique do the labeling, allowing fiction to borrow from reportage, essay, and satire without announcing the borrowing.

Just as important is what the volume does not do. It does not romanticize the “New Yorker story” as a finished object dropped from a height. The century on display here is full of revisions in what counts as elegant, what counts as daring, what counts as “too much.” You watch prose shed certain manners and acquire new ones; you watch cultural taboos tighten and loosen; you watch how quickly a once-acceptable posture can curdle into something the present refuses. That historical friction is part of the achievement, because it prevents nostalgia from turning into myth.

Selection is where the editor’s hand becomes most visible, and Treisman’s candor helps. The book does not pretend to settle the canon once and for all. It invites argument, which is a subtle form of generosity. Still, absences matter, and the volume’s scale makes them feel personal: the reader begins to imagine alternative histories, different emphases, more translation, more genre adjacency, more work that once scandalized, more work that is not yet officially “important” but might become so. Yet it would be a mistake to treat absence as failure. A century cannot be gathered without distortion. The only honest anthology is one that reveals, through its choices, the shape of the editor’s question.

The shape Treisman makes is, largely, a shape of legibility. Even at its most experimental, this is fiction that expects to be read by a general audience in a weekly magazine. That constraint, rather than limiting the work, often sharpens it. The experiments are rarely hermetic. The stories are social. They keep an eye on pleasure, on speed, on the immediate hook of voice. If the anthology sometimes feels weighted toward a certain kind of sophistication, it is a sophistication rooted in clarity rather than in exclusion: the sense that complexity should be felt, not performed.

There is, however, a practical challenge built into the project. So much excellence in one place can flatten the experience. In a single sitting, a century becomes a blur, and the differences between decades can feel like shifts in lighting rather than shifts in architecture. The book is best approached the way one might approach a museum that contains too much. You do not run from room to room trying to see everything. You linger, you leave, you return. Read that way, the chronological arrangement becomes an instrument: it lets you hear changes in diction, in pacing, in what counts as a plausible ending, in what counts as a plausible life.

What the anthology does superbly is make social history audible without turning fiction into sociology. You can hear changes in diction, in the temperature of irony, in what counts as intimacy, in what kinds of lives are permitted to be central. You can hear the moment when polite social comedy begins to accommodate dread, and the moment when dread learns to speak in jokes. You can hear the shifting grammar of class, sex, race, war, and work without being handed a thesis statement. The book trusts fiction’s most basic power: its ability to smuggle ideas inside experience, to let a reader feel the world changing at the level of voice and scene.

For writers, this volume is also a craft manual disguised as an anniversary monument. It teaches, by accumulation, how many ways there are to begin, how many ways there are to end, how a single object can become a hinge, how dialogue can be both music and knife. It shows that a story can achieve depth through density or through spareness, through formal play or through strict realism, through voice alone or through architecture. And it returns the short story to its original habitat: not a laboratory specimen, not a classroom exercise, but a living form meant to be read in the middle of life, capable of astonishing you and then sending you back out into the day slightly altered.

If the book has a weakness, it is the same weakness that attends any centennial gesture: the temptation to treat a hundred years as a coherent unit, a neat container with a beginning and an end. The stories themselves resist that neatness. They leak into one another. They argue across decades. They remind you that literary history is not a staircase but a crowd. The anthology is at its best when it allows that crowd to be noisy, when it places a meticulously controlled piece beside a piece that feels like it has kicked a hole in the wall, and lets both claim the right to be here.

To call “A Century of Fiction in The New Yorker: 1925–2025” definitive would be to misunderstand it. Its greatness is not that it provides the last word on a century. Its greatness is that it reopens the archive as something alive and arguable, and it does so with both authority and play. My own response lands at an 89 out of 100 – an endorsement with room left for the anthology’s inevitable omissions, for the fatigue that can come with so much brilliance between two covers, and for the suspicion that no century should be made to fit quite so neatly between them. But as an education of taste, and as a sheer pleasure, the book is remarkably close to what it sets out to be: a set of signposts that makes you want to keep walking, and to keep reading with a sharpened ear.

[F H Bender · Rating 3 out of 5]

A bit disappointed

Of course, there are some jewels in this collection. But, I disagree with the overall selection. A lot of the stories contained animal cruelty which is upsetting and unnecessary. Other stories were disturbing for the sheer sake of being disturbing. I had to skip past many of started stories. I subscribe to the New Yorker so I know that there could've been a better selection.

[Paul Mackie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Celebrating 100 years of fiction from The New Yorker

https://popculturelunchbox.substack.c...

I’ve religiously read The New Yorker ever since I was an undergrad literature major. At that time, I was drawn to the fiction in every issue but I’ve since kept returning for the razor-sharp political commentary, the unmatched investigative reporting (and exceptional editing, which needs to be mentioned in an era of seriously diminished fact checking and overwhelming misinformation), and of course the cartoons.

Taking me back to my fiction roots with the weekly magazine is a new tome titled A Century of Fiction in The New Yorker: 1925-2025. In the introduction, editor Deborah Treisman (pictured) gives a little background:

Harold Ross was the first editor and he mostly published fiction that did not particularly distinguish itself. The stories showed promise, but they were mostly “what we’d now call sketches—each a pithy short scene, bound to one setting, that ends with a punchline of sorts” in which the nearly always male protagonist “confronts a new reality. In the 1930s, plot was frowned upon. Parable, prophecy, fable, fantasy, satire, burlesque, parody, nonsense tales were omitted.”

In the 1940s, a lot of the writers also worked in Hollywood and dialogue was the thing. These stories were mostly morality tales told with detachment and despair.

The 1950s saw stories retreating from war and into domesticity. Up through this time, there were no labels on the magazine’s articles or in the table of contents, so readers never knew if they were getting fiction, memoir, reporting, or criticism. “One had to simply figure it out as one read.” Writers of other nationalities were rare also until about the late 50s.

Even up through the 1980s, “the magazine eschewed vulgarity, profanity, and sexual imagery.” “Fuck” didn’t appear until 1985 and “pussy” until 1993. Stories themselves had evolved into “full-blown narratives, almost mini novels.”

Out of 13,000 pieces of fiction published in the magazine over 100 years, the anthology picks 78 to highlight. It starts with these three stories …

“Life Cycle of a Literary Genius,” by E.B. White (1926) takes about a minute to read and tells the life story of a person who goes from a boy to a man, marking that growth process with each of his publishing milestones. The man dies and it even begins telling his illegitimate son’s story of writing the great American novel. It may not be as great as Charlotte’s Web—which White wouldn’t publish until 1952 —but it does show how brilliant The New Yorker was set to become. 5 out of 5 stars

“Over the River and Through the Wood” by John O’Hara (1934) presents the meanderings of an old man named Mr. Winfield who takes a car ride with his granddaughter and two of her friends. Nothing much happens in the course of the story by O’Hara—a literal giant in the first half of The New Yorker’s existence but a bit of a fading thought at this point—until the end when he accidentally sees one of the girls nearly naked. He knows his life is over at that point because others will see him as a doddering senile old man. I’m not really sure why this is included in the collection, but it’s luckily only about a 15-minute read. 3 out of 5 stars

“The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” by James Thurber (1939) is one I’ve read many times and, of course, it could never get old. One of the best short stories ever, it tells the tale of an afternoon in the life of Mitty, whose wife is getting her hair done and instructs him to go get overshoes and doggie biscuits and meet her later at a hotel. He nearly forgets both incidental items because he’s too busy daydreaming that he’s on trial, that he’s a military bomber, and that finally he is having his last cigarette before the firing squad turns towards him. It’s a wonderful reminder that the mind and the imagination are worth revisiting time and time again, even if you’re stuck doing the most mundane errands possible. In the year of The Wizard of Oz and Gone with the Wind, Mitty is another reminder that there was something special in the air in 1939. 5 out of 5 stars

[Richard Jespers · Rating 5 out of 5]

I do not love all short stories I read any more than I love all novels or poetry collections. But I do love the short story form. It is to prose what a poem is to . . . poetry. In a novel, much of the prose is spent on getting the reader from point A to B; it can’t all be lyrical (unless you’re Fitzgerald or maybe dozens others going back centuries in British and American literature—I could be wrong). But a short story—much like a poem—can be toyed with, polished like a diamond, before it is unleashed on the world.

Few of this collection’s stories written from 1925 through the 1970s catch my fancy. With regard to those written in the 1980s, I am fond of Jamaica Kincaid’s “The Red Girl” and William Maxwell’s “Love.” From the 1990s, I appreciate Annie Proulx’s “Brokeback Mountain,” for sure, as well as Jhumpa Lahiri’s, “The Third and Final Continent.” With regard to the 2000s, ZZ Packer writes a fine story, “Drinking Coffee Elsewhere,” and Sherman Alexie blows me away with “What You Pawn I Will Redeem,” Alice Munro (as always) impresses me with “Dimension,” as does Salman Rushdie with his “In the South.” From the 2010s come perhaps the richest stories in the collection, and I’m not sure why. These narratives are not all from the youngest writers. Mary Gaitskill’s “The Other Place,” Robert Coover’s “Going for a Beer,” Tessa Hadley’s “An Abduction,” Steven Millhauser’s “A Voice in the Night,” Ben Marcus’s “Cold Little Bird,” Lauren Groff’s “The Midnight Zone,” and Yiyun Li’s “All Will Be Well” are exquisite stories opening up to readers to what the twenty-first century short story may be all about so far. And I treasure Bryan Washington’s fine work, “Visitor,” perhaps most because it portrays only the second LGBTQIA+ protagonist in the entire century of stories.

I spent four months perusing this book primarily because when I am reading a collection, I like to take in one story per day so that I can absorb it and not mix it up with one I might have just ended reading a few minutes ago. If you, too, care deeply about the short story, you might find this collection delightful, especially if you regularly read New Yorker fiction. Enjoy!

[Robert Yokoyama · Rating 5 out of 5]

The diversity of themes in this book are impressive and highly resonate with me in some way. My favorite stories are the "The First American", "Seven" and "The Third and Final Continent". These are stories about people who immigrate from Austria and Haiti and India, who try to assimilate to life in the United States and learn the English language. The relatives on my mother's side all struggled to do this when they came here. My other favorite story is "Defender of The Faith" by Phillip Roth. Even though I am not Jewish, I found the extent of the main character to defend his faith to be powerful reading. "Midnight In Dostoevsky" is a great story about two college friends and their observations about a mysterious stranger. This story has an unusual twist to it. Midnight in Dostoevsky also has a secondary character in the form of a college logic professor. The professor in this story reminds me a lot of a professor who pushed me academically. I also love the buddy road trip stories like "The Happiest I've Ever Been" and "Gallatin Canyon" These two stories explore some interesting sights across the midwestern part of the United States that I would love to see someday. The book ends with the story "Crown Heights North". This story resonates with me because I am a man in my fifties who is trying to be steadfast in staying healthy like the main character in this story.

[Tor Braham · Rating 4 out of 5]

There are of course many wonderful stories selected in this anthology.

Just the same, it is striking how many boring or unworthy stories were included, and also how many truly wonderful stories didn’t make it in. I think one of the reasons is that it seems Treisman selected stories by famous authors, rather than the very best stories themselves.

Also, it seems to be that’s there was an effort to be politically correct or to bring a modern sensibility in the selection, which is inevitable and fine. But I do think it contributed to missing some fantastic writing, and including some mediocre stories.

I love the New Yorker, and I do read almost all the fiction each week, at least unless I decide some story can be skipped. This is the primary way I learn about writers who I may want to go read. So I believe I have a keen respect for the enormous wealth of great fiction writing in the magazine.

Overall, I am very happy with this collection. But I would call it a B plus selection. So I gave it a 4.

[Wendy · Rating 4 out of 5]

A Century of Fiction in the New Yorker (1925-2025) captures the evolving landscape of American life, reflecting shifts from the roaring twenties' exuberance to today's complex social narratives. Throughout the century, the magazine's writing has both mirrored and shaped cultural conversations, showcasing a remarkable progression from escapist storytelling to incisive explorations of identity, technology, and global interconnectedness.

[maria 🌥️ · Rating 5 out of 5]

stories read where
-life cycle of a literary genius by E.B White
-the weeds by Mary Mccarthy
- A perfect day for bananafish by J.D Salinger
- Children are bored on Sundays by Jene Stafford
-Symbols and Signs by Vladimir Nabokov
- The Lottery by Shirley Jackson
- A summers reading by Bernard Malamud
- the bookseller by elizabeth hardwick

[Garry · Rating 3 out of 5]

I have read wonderful stories in the New Yorker over the years and was surprised that none of them were reprinted in this book. Some of the stories were worthy and others were just not so.
Everyone's taste is different.

[Mark Patton · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely loved this collection. I'm not sure how they decided on the magical number of 78 stories, but, my one complaint, they could have made it, say, 85 and included more stories from the front end of the century. The collection is unevenly weighted toward the latter end.

[Mochi · Rating 5 out of 5]

a really interesting and excellent anthology to sample from! i think i read 24/78 stories. since each story is so good and so different in style i could only read one at a time. i really liked the alice munro, yiyun li, and nabokov stories. and brokeback mountain ofc 😭

[John Bond · Rating 5 out of 5]

Master class of the best short stories over the past 100 years. From Shirley Jackson to Updike to Annie Proulx to Zadie Smith. A must read for any true fan of modern literature and the New Yorker.

[Jan Shillington · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one big book!
Unusual stories by great authors.
This was from my local library; I will definitely put another hold on it so I can continue to read the stories.

[Jim Higgins · Rating 5 out of 5]

Outstanding anthology of 78 stories. No clunkers and many truly superior ones

[Marlla · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5*

[Vignesh Adhinarayanan · Rating 5 out of 5]

A great compilation of short stories. I have only read 8 so far, and all of them were fantastic.