Exciting news! Our handy page of the best stories in The New Yorker (according to Houghton Mifflin, anyway) has been greatly expanded. Today I discovered this rather remarkable website, overseen by one William G. Contento, which lists the contents of a great many fiction anthologies, Houghton Mifflin included.
Most of the years between 1939 and 1976 are now represented. (Either the anthologies did not publish a “Notable” list or Mr. Contento chose not to include them. I suspect the latter—I wouldn’t want to type all that stuff in, either.) This explains why the new batch of lists looks rather skimpy alongside the more recent lists. If you go only by the stories that were actually included in the anthologies, there has been little change since 1939. Four was about the most you could expect in the 1940s, and it’s about the most you can expect now.
The new lists are very interesting, I think. Irwin Shaw comes up a lot. Some names are conspicuously missing, notably J.D. Salinger and Vladimir Nabokov, although it’s possible they were chosen in years that are still missing. John Cheever and John Updike are represented. Matthew Yglesias‘s grandfather makes the list.
The most intriguing name on the list, in my opinion, is Mary Lavin. I had not heard of her until today, but she must have been a very impressive woman indeed, overseeing a farm and raising three daughters on her own during the time her stories were written. A mere glance at the lists will disclose that she was very, very esteemed. Consider this: Over a period of eighteen years, she wrote just fifteen stories for The New Yorker—and yet only Updike, Alice Munro, and Louise Erdrich were able to have more of their New Yorker stories selected, in the years for which we have data.
In any case, decades have elapsed. It’s up to you to decide whether such resonant names as St. Clair McKelway, Hortense Calisher, Lyll Becerra de Jenkins, Carlos Bulosan, and Louis Bromfield have been forgotten justly or criminally. —Martin Schneider