Everything But the Fiction - The New Yorker Fiction Blog

The last few months, I have noticed how many people in New York read The New Yorker. Riding on the Subway, Tuesday afternoons, Wednesday mornings, it is guaranteed I will see more than one person yielding The New Yorker tight to his or her face, trying to read through the bumps, slides, and abrupt stops of the subway. 

What types of people are reading this magazine? A good friend of mine wrote a piece about attending events at the 92nd street YMCA that had a great line about how one couldn’t avoid The New Yorker in certain areas of Manhattan, and I agree, but I also think the magazine’s influence stretches to a more youthful crowd than one might expect. During rainy Brooklyn afternoons, I have noticed my favorite yuppie gentrifiers reading the magazine at coffee houses, and several evenings, I walk will walk into a small, niche Williamsburg restaurant and find a young woman waiting for her meal alone at the bar, using the magazine to avoid catching eyes with horny pick-up patrons such as myself. 

Furthermore, several of my friends and acquaintances under thirty, most with no interest in magazine publishing or journalism as a profession, read the magazine regularly. (Actually, my friends over thirty and under fifty seem to be the people with no interest in the magazine. Now that I think about it, those friends by and large never seem to be reading anything – too busy working real careers, listening to their pregnant wives, drinking away the work week, and preparing to enjoy their life sentences as parents, I presume. Doesn’t stop them from being experts on everything though. I guess they get their knowledge from television and cyberspace.) The magazine felt even more ageless when I attended a recent college graduation ceremony and spoke with the younger sister of a college friend. Talking to fresh alum and her mother, they both told me they read The New Yorker front to back every week, with the exception of a small section towards the back of the magazine called Fiction. This amazed me, because the daughter is an aspiring fiction writer like me, but she said the fiction in the magazine doesn’t interest her. She tries to read it, but gets bored or lost by the first few paragraphs. The mother seemed nonchalant in her dismissal of the section and didn’t bother to explain. Both of their responses to The New Yorker’s fiction shocked me, not from surprise, but from the realization of just how many people I had heard complain about the fiction in The New Yorker.

 
Many of my friends, like me, are fiction writers, and our relationship to the fiction section of The New Yorker is more complicated. While, many rant and complain about its fiction, claiming the editors require rigorous re-drafting of stories, or that all the fiction has a certain style and the magazine doesn’t allow writers that challenge this aesthetic, (I mostly think their distaste for the fiction stems from knocking on the magazine’s door and never being granted entrance), none of us can deny the great writers who have come through those mid-town doors. Some of the greatest fiction writers in America’s literary history, like Ann Beattie, John Cheever, Phillip Roth, and Donald Barthelme, published their stories in the magazine, and its influence has help make the career of current literary success stories Junot Diaz and Jhumpa Lahiri. Despite any grievance with the magazine, most of us writers keep an eye on who it taps; because we know publication in The New Yorker has the possibility to create what we desire more than anything: the widest audience possible.

That said, I really believe many of the magazine’s readers, disinterested in writing themselves, don’t give a flying fuck about the fiction section. Odd, too, since publication in the magazine can almost ensure excitement about the arrival of a writer’s book; it’s like fiction readers and bookstores and the literary world know to pay more attention to a book if the writer has previously been published in The New Yorker, while ignoring the work when it is actually in the magazine. Well, Mr. New Yorker, I plan to knock off your top hat, give you some green colored contacts to replace those Benjamin Franklin bifocals, cut your hair, and force you to wear t-shirts with messages like Stop Snitching, and Fcuk You!

Jokes aside, the goal of this blog will be to take apart the short stories published in that magazine, not to tear them down, but to see how they work, and to talk about their themes and emotions. I often love The New Yorker’s short stories, and the ones I don’t love still teach me as much about our world as the profiles, witty commentaries, and reviews. 

Now, I have set a few rules for myself. I will not talk about the biographical information of the writer. Who cares? Well, admittedly, it can be interesting to know the life behind an artist, but this blog is dedicated to talking about the work, that’s it. Also, unlike many book reviews or literary criticism, I don’t want to spend the whole blog comparing this short story to others by the author, or short stories and novels by other writers, past or present. I find this type of criticism fruitful for long time fans of a writer, but a person who reads a short story in The New Yorker may just want to read and share thoughts about that particular story, not that author’s career or the career of writers like her. Those are my two rules, and I’m sticking by them. Thanks for reading, and by tomorrow morning I will have posted a response to this week’s New Yorker short story by George Saunders called “Puppy”.