55 Short Stories From The New Yorker

by The New Yorker

The enormous radio / John Cheever
Defeat / Kay Boyle
Man here keeps getting arrested all the time / John McNulty
Down in the reeds by the river / Victoria Lincoln
A winter in the country / Robert M. Coates
The catbird seat / James Thurber
Lady with a lamp / Sally Benson
Act of faith / Irwin Shaw
The ballet visits the Splendide's magician / Ludwig Bemelmans
The middle drawer / Hortense Calisher
The dilemma of Catherine Fuchsias / Rhys Davies
The nightingales sing / Elizabeth Parsons
The second tree from the corner / E.B. White
The pleasures of travel / Wendell Wilcox
Content with the station / John Andrew Rice
A perfect day for bananafish / J.D. Salinger
The patterns of love / William Maxwell
The lottery / Shirley Jackson
Yonder peasant, who is he? / Mary McCarthy
The decision / John O'Hara
Her bed is India / Christine Weston
Inflexible logic / Russell Maloney
The falling leaves / Frances Gray Patton
My da / Frank O'Connor
The four freedoms / Edward Newhouse
A view of Exmoor / Sylvia Townsend Warner
Children are bored on Sunday / Jean Stafford
Mr. Skidmore's gift / Oliver La Farge
A short wait between trains / Robert McLaughlin
Party at the Williamsons' / Astrid Peters
Monsoon / Jerome Weidman
Song at twilight / Wolcott Gibbs
Run, run, run, run / A.J. Liebling
The jockey / Carson McCullers
Pigeons en casserole / Bessie Breuer
A killing / Roger Angell
Goodby, my love / Mollie Panter-Downes
Colette / Vladimir Nabokov
A clean, quiet house / Daniel Fuchs
Village incident / James A. Maxwell
De mortuis / John Collier
Then we'll set it right / Robert Gorham Davis
The mysteries of life in an orderly manner / Jessamyn West
Porte-cochère / Peter Taylor
The evolution of knowledge / Niccolò Tucci
Continued humid / Mark Schorer
The baby-amah / Emily Hahn
Truth and consequences / Brendan Gill
Between the dark and the daylight / Nancy Hale
The judgment of Paris / James Reid Parker
Mary Mulcahy / Christopher La Farge
The bummers / John Powell
Under Gemini / Isabel Bolton
The improvement in Mr. Gaynor's technique / S.N. Behrman
Black secret / Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings.

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction, Anthologies

480 pages, Library Binding

Published January 1, 1949

About the author

The New Yorker is an American magazine of reportage, commentary, criticism, essays, fiction, satire, cartoons, and poetry published by Condé Nast Publications. Starting as a weekly in the mid-1920s, the magazine is now published forty-seven times per year, with five of these issues covering two-week spans.

Reviews

[Rosalie]

This book is on my nightstand. It's a first edition and it doesn't travel well so reading and commuting is out of the question. 5/15/09. I'll finish it eventually!

[Helene · Rating 4 out of 5]

I want one for every century!

[Oldkeywestie · Rating 5 out of 5]

When I was young, many years ago, back at the beginning of the 1970’s, an English teacher requested everyone in the class bring in a sample article from either a newspaper or periodical. There were certain newspapers that were not allowed, i.e., the tabloids. No Martian abductions please. The suggested reading literature was along the lines of the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and The New Yorker. I chose The New Yorker not because of some linguistic prowess on my part, but only because I had already spent years perusing the cartoons in the issues in the Orthodontist’s office in New York. It was a fortuitous decision. From that point on, I indulged my literary appetite in the pages of The New Yorker, especially during the long commutes into and back from Manhattan.

This latest completed read of “55 Short Stories from The New Yorker 1940 to 1950” is an entertaining, but also illuminating look into the 40’s. Yes, these are the war years, but the European and Pacific conflicts do not make up the contents of this collection. The stories are instead built around the lives of “ordinary” people, or what can be fictionally construed as ordinary. They are wonderful not only to read, but to contemplate the time in which they were written, illuminate and illustrate the prevailing culture and just provide a brief respite from what must have been a very trying time for all who pondered the fate of democracy and the free world. Even after the war.

I thoroughly recommend indulging in this collection, not from a literary criticism perspective, I am hardly qualified for that, but just for the entertainment and glimpse into the 1940s that the contributors to this book inhabited.