The New Yorker Radio Hour - The New Yorker Celebrates a Hundred Years as a Poetry and Fiction Tastemaker

Episode Date: February 4, 2025

David Remnick talks with The New Yorker’s literary guiding lights: the fiction editor Deborah Treisman and the poetry editor Kevin Young. Treisman edited “A Century of Fiction in The New Yorker,�� and Young edited “A Century of Poetry in The New Yorker,” both of which were published this month.  “When you asked me to do this,” Young remarks to David Remnick, “I think my first response was, I’ve only wanted to do this since I was fifteen. . . . It was kind of a dream come true.” Treisman talks about the way that stories age, and the difficulty of selecting stories. “The thing to remember is that even geniuses don’t always write their best work right right off the bat. People make a lot of noise about rejection letters from The New Yorker that went to famous writers, or later-famous writers. And they were probably justified, those rejections.” New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. This is The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. In February, just a couple of weeks from now, the New Yorker will mark its centenary, a hundred years of publishing. And yet, when we began, the New Yorker's founding editor, Harold Ross, saw the magazine almost purely as what he called a comic paper. Those first issues were light as air. But when we were, Once Ross made the crucial hire of Catherine White, an editor who insisted on bringing the best of fiction and poetry to the magazine, things changed.

And over a century's worth of issues, we've published an immense body of short fiction and poems. I mean, the New Yorker is published in its history, close to 14,000 pieces of fiction. So you went back and read every single one. And how many poems do we have any idea, Kevin? I think you might eclipse us. I think we're at 13,500 or something I thought.

Deborah Treesman and Kevin Young have just put together two anthologies to celebrate the New Yorker centennial. Deborah has been the magazine's fiction editor and my colleague since 2003, and she's just edited A Century of Fiction at The New Yorker. Kevin joined us as poetry editor in 2017. He's an amazing poet and the director of the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture. And in his spare time, he's edited the new book, A Century of Poetry at the New Yorker. Kevin, you said that when you were growing up, you bought a copy of the New Yorker Book of Poems Anthology, which was published in 1969. What do you remember about reading that

book, about who was included, and maybe at least as much to the point who was not? Yeah, I remember vividly reading it, and I still have my copy, and it's very neatly underlined in ink, which I wouldn't do now. I think I'm a pencil guy mostly. But, you know, just to see, like James Dickie's falling, for instance, which is sort of this bravura piece. It's pages and pages. I'm not sure we would even run something as long as that, but to see it. I would hope that we would. Okay. Well, you've heard it, folks. You've heard it, folks. It was actually kind of surprising when you asked me, you know, to do this. I think my first response was, I've only wanted to do this since I was 15, you know, like, I've been thinking about, you know, this idea. And so it was like kind of a dream come true.

and I pulled the book off the shelf and saw my underlines and was so excited, and then I realized there's not one person of color in that whole book. And then you who come along so many years later were only the sixth black poet in our pages. But, you know, 1999, that's a long time. What accounts for that? It was missing a lot of opportunities for the range of American poetry. And it wasn't just African-American poets. It's missing Asian poetry.

It's missing the long tradition of Asian poetry. or African poetry. You know, it doesn't include that in translation even. You know, an anthology is we have the advantage of looking back and selecting and saying, well, that's obvious, as Deborah's saying. But it isn't always in the process. And I actually, what is interesting to me is I haven't gone through the archive and figured out, is it people didn't send?

Because there is a kind of level of, you know, if it's not welcoming, why would you send your poem there? Right. The beat poets in the 50s, I think they would have found the New Yorker anathema somehow. Right, exactly. the New York school often until then Ashbury's in, and then he was in a lot, you know. And so that's what's interesting is it isn't one sort of taste only, but, you know, you have someone like Sister Sonia Sanchez, a wonderful poet. She was taught by Louise Bogan, you know, and that connection to the New Yorker was there for her in the beginning.

And so in a way, there is this tie, even though it's not shown in the magazine. So I think there's a lot of interesting connections still. I was over at the New York Public Library yesterday, and one of the archives showed me some correspondence between the fiction department and Jerry Salinger, J.D. Salinger. And the first note is a very curt, no thank you, and suddenly it gets a lot warmer. As a fiction editor, even today,

do you live in fear of missing a potential genius? When things come in, what are you always thinking? Well, I guess the thing to remember is that even geniuses don't always write their best work right off the bat. You know, people make a lot of noise about rejection letters from the New Yorker that went to famous writers or later famous writers. And they were probably justified those rejections. And Beatty, 44 rejections before Roger Angel took them. I think it was only 13. Well, 44, 13.

He wrote her, you know, very detailed letters about what he was exasperated with in her work and encouraging her to do something different. But at least, you know, he spotted that she had something fresh and interesting and different. And he encouraged that. There was a period, a long period, where people would refer to the New Yorker story, that there was this thing called the New Yorker short story. What was it and how did that reputation develop, fairly or not? Well, I think generally the cliche is that it's a story about a working man in the suburbs who commutes into the city and cheats on his wife perhaps or thinks about it. Wistfully. You know, it's very much about white middle class married life and that it ends with an epiphany.

you know, like Irwin Shaw's girls in their summer dresses which is just a moment of a man, a husband and wife talking in a bar and he's thinking about attractive girls. But it's...

These things happen. These things happen, right? There were slices of life, not so much narratives. And when you went back and read a whole bunch of these, how did you react to them? Were you, did you admire them more

than you thought you would? Were you bored with them? Well, I read them with a different eye because there's so much of their time. And that was also what was interesting in reading for the anthology was considering whether it was correct to include stories that feel dated now because they were representative of their time or whether it would be better to simply include stories that continue to resonate. What choice did you make? I think the latter. I hope, yeah. For the most part.

But you know, then you're not representing a large number of works, which meant something at the time, but meanless now. The New Yorker's fiction editor, Deborah Treisman, will continue in a moment. The thing that seems to date maybe fastest when I look back at old New Yorkers is humor. I'll read the supposedly hilarious Alexander Wilcott, and I don't know what the hell he's talking about, three-quarters of the time. I think humor is really, it's time-stamped. I mean, I mostly think that, but I think the really funny, you know, like Dorothy Parker feels very modern and crisp.

And sometimes what you're encountering, in my opinion, is a generic kind of of the time humor, like, you know, at a smoker, you know, in the 50s that, you know, was a hilarious, you know, golf joke, you know, it doesn't really resonate. Is it equivalent to a New Yorker poem, as it was a New Yorker story? Yeah. I mean, I think especially the 20s, a kind of rhyming, clever poem, quatrains, no doubt, that, you know, comes to a clever conclusion, usually the opposite of what you might have thought. You know, so there's a kind of like, I like going out, but I sure like staying home. Like, if only, you know, it's just something kind of like that. But also you saw a lot of light verse, Ogden Nash and the like. But some of that is so great.

It's so playful with language. So if you got that today, you thought it was successful, in it would go. I would hope. Do people write it? They don't write it this much. Why? I think I, well, I have Auden's view of light verse. He edited in Oxford Anthology of Light Verse.

And one of the things he talks about, he includes the blues in there. And one of the things I think is so clever about that is he has this broad view of light verse as a kind of musical. What's interesting about looking back then, like there's a lot of, you know, Harlem Renaissance poets who were very formal and could have easily fit in those pages. And so that's why it's a little surprising.

Kevin, you went with a different choice on how you organize this book. Maybe you should explain it. Yeah, I wanted to kind of give that sense of the time period and move from the 20s, and I kind of grouped these decades together, especially at the beginning. But I thought if you just marched through it,

you'd have a lot of pages of things that might, you know, not talk to each other in the same way as if you think about theme. And the other anthologies, the previous New Yorker ones, were thematic in different ways or alphabetical. I think the 69 one is out. It's crazy. My title. It's crazy. You don't know where to navigate this thing. Right.

So instead, I said, well, what about if it's like a day? And so it starts with the morning, a morning bell, and then, you know, has a lunch break. and then it has an after-work drink and goes like that. So you interspersed the time, the progression of the day. And it's ingenious and it really works. You begin the anthology, Kevin, with a poem by a Polish poet. Tell me the story of this poem when it appeared. And maybe, after you do, maybe you could read it for us.

Yeah, this is try to praise the mutilated world by Adam Zagayevsky. And it appears in the September 17th issue, which, as you know, was the issue right after September 11th, 2001. And to be just a week after September 11th. It was the issue right after 9-11. Which I remember getting it. Yeah, with the black cover by Art Spiegelman and Francois Moulli and long narrative by a lot of reporters about what had happened. It had to start the anthology. There was no way you couldn't.

sort of frame our current moment and looking back without that iconic issue and this iconic poem. So this is Try to Praise the Mutilated World by Adam Zagayevsky. Try to praise the mutilated world. Remember June's long days. And wild strawberries, drops of wine, the dew, the nettles that methodically overgrow the abandoned homesteads of exiles. You must praise the mutilated world. You watched the stylish yachts and ships. One of them had a long trip ahead of it, while salty oblivion awaited others. You've seen the refugees heading nowhere. You've heard the executioners sing joyfully. You should praise the mutilated world. Remember the moments when we were

together in a white room and the curtain fluttered. return and thought to the concert or music flared. You gathered acorns in the park in autumn and leaves eddied over the earth's scars. Praise the mutilated world and the gray feather a thrush lost, and the gentle light that strays and vanishes and returns. I remember it happening. I remember Alice Quinn giving me this thing, and I was like everybody else. a wreck. I had slept in the office half the week and I just was, I was a puddle. I was a puddle

and I got this thing and we just put it on the back page, which is not normally where we put poems. But, you know, I'm thinking about this just now because we've had the fires in California and we just ran a fire poem the very week. It came in literally the day or a few days after and we were able to run it. That poem is out in the anthology, but there a number of poems about COVID and pandemic and what 2020 was like and the murder of George Floyd. I mean, these are things poetry can do and the magazine can do better than anyone and run a week later. Deborah, how do you see politics filtering or not filtering into the short stories that you read week after week? Well, I was just thinking about 2016 when our slush pile of submissions was full of satires about Trump.

And somehow it was just too direct. It wasn't nuanced. They weren't worked as literature. They weren't good writing in that sense. But then there were quite a few stories a little bit of time later in which the Trump presidency was a backdrop. And its effects were playing out in families or in relationships. And that was really effective.

Deborah, I want to ask you about your day-to-day work as fiction editor. How many stories does The New Yorker get a week? Probably between 100 and 200. That's a lot of stories. It is. So how do you, what's the process of selecting the story? Yeah. Well, there's myself and three other people in the fiction department, and we're all being sent things.

And then there's an unsolicited section of submissions, which are read by our wonderful fiction readers who will pass along to the editors, anything they think is promising. Just for the record, we're reading everything. We're reading everything. And you and the great Hannah Eisenman, who you work with, how many poems come each week?

I more know that annually about 48,000 comes. Whoa, whoa, whoa. They're shorter than the story. 48,000 poems. Let's say 40, 40. And we publish about a hundred. A hundred a year, yeah. So we do read them, but it is, you know, a slightly smaller group of people reading.

And, you know, we have a lot shorter. Yeah, but, you know, they'll send five. You know, they won't send just one. So, you know, I once talked to Alice Quinn about this years ago when I was, you know, just sending to the New Yorker. And she said, you know, I would feel weird if we had less. Yes. We have people in a given year. Jerry Graham is most likely going to publish a poem,

and we could name, I don't know, 20 other or more, as it were, regulars that have been publishing poems in the New Yorker for a while. Same with short story writers. George Saunders arrives with something or Lori Moore or Edwidge Dan and cut it, whatever. But you're always looking for something new. How does this all work? Usually between 20 and 25 percent of stories in a given year are by people who are publishing in the New Yorker for the first time.

So it's quite a high number when you consider that their next story. They're not in that category. I guess the goal is really just thinking about a story's ambition, what it's trying to be, what effect it's trying to have on the reader, and taking it if it's successful with that. Can you remember a time where you've opened an envelope and it's somebody that you hadn't heard of, and you just by the end of half an hour later,

you're singing, oh, happy day? Well, can I remember a time when I opened an envelope? Tushé and fair enough. Or an e-mail, yes. Absolutely, I can, absolutely. Yeah. So, you know, one fairly recent case of that is the story that went viral and got the most attention online that any New Yorker story has ever got, which was Cat Person by Kristen Rupenian. and hit a nerve, and she had not published widely at all.

She did not have a book out, but it was a story that spoke to people. The books are a century of fiction and a century of poetry at the New Yorker, Deborah Treisman, Kevin Young, and I want a little shout out here to Deborah Garrison, who was so wonderful at Knappen, helping us all out. Thank you so much. Happy anniversary. Happy anniversary.

That's the New Yorker. fiction editor Deborah Treesman, along with our poetry editor, Kevin Young, a century of fiction and a century of poetry come out this month, and of course, you can always subscribe at New Yorker.com. I'm David Remnick. This is The New Yorker Radio Hour. Thanks for joining us, and see you next time. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of Tune Arts, with additional music by Jared Paul. This episode was produced by Max Balton. Adam Howard, David Krasnow, Jeffrey Masters, Louis Mitchell, Jared Paul, and Ursula Summer.

With guidance from Emily Boutin and assistance from Michael May, David Gable, Alex Barish, Victor Gwan, and Alejandra Deccett. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.