At least whenever there’s a new fake-memoir scandal or a general railing against “irresponsible bloggers,” which becomes a meaningless phrase as soon as veteran journalists and, ah, newsmen start blogging up a storm.
At other times, fact-checkers are often forgotten, underpaid, and/or belittled as comical Bartlebys, toiling by lamplight with poor eyesight and minimal glitz and celebrating minute victories like the ones chronicled in “Are You Completely Bald?,” a brilliant old New Republic story about the art and agony of fact-checking that’s a lot harder to find than you’d think (and I’ve tried!). Fact-checkers are fussy ghosts, invoked respectfully in their absence and mildly teased for their pedantic obsessions just out of hearing range.*
Except at a few good magazines, primarily The New Yorker, where fact-checking is considered such a vital necessity that only the most well-rounded and world-savvy applicants are interviewed (and I mean interviewed). There’s a reason the checkers there are routinely cited by those outraged about the crimes of too-inventive writers. All fact-checkers grumble, in my experience, but there’s less cause for it when they have steady jobs, salaries, benefits, lore (confess, who would you rather be in Bright Lights, Big City—Nameless Narrator as he wakes up cold and lonely on the friendless street after too much coke, or NN in the library amid the reference volumes, making courageous international phone calls, and paging through, say, Ian Frazier’s notes to verify an intricate New Yorker profile?) and the faith of the majority of the writers whose stories they verify and strengthen.
Speaking of which, Slate’s Daniel Engber has assembled a funny collection of revelations about other well-known autobiographies, past, present, and future. Also on Slate, newyorker.com editor Blake Eskin’s reflection on fake memoirist Misha Defonseca, who was not brought up by wolves as she escaped the Holocaust, is worth reading. If you want a rigorously researched and compelling book, read Eskin’s memoir/exposé A Life in Pieces, whose accounts and investigations are all the more electrifying and poignant for being absolutely true.
While we’re telling panicky book publishers how to conduct their increasingly imperiled business (although the news that people like reading books on paper is somewhat comforting), could we add a politely voiced plea for the return of the publishing-house copy editor? Forget about made-up facts for a moment—I just want most of the words to be spelled right.
*By the way, as a former fact-checker myself, I can assure you that many of them are in fact adorable, attractive, and socially ept.
Category Archives: Hit Parade
Who’s Published the Most Short Stories in The New Yorker?
The third installment of a new column on New Yorker fiction, past and present, by writer and editor Benjamin Chambers.
A couple of weeks ago, I rashly declared that John Updike had to be the record-holder when it came to publishing the most short stories in The New Yorker. Should’ve known better than to venture so boldly into speculation: as it happens, The New Yorker‘s librarians, Jon Michaud and Erin Overbey, covered this for Emdashes a while back in “Ask the Librarians,” and it turns out that James Thurber and S.J. Perelman are the neck-and-neck front-runners by far. Despite his prodigious output, Updike isn’t even in the top three—he comes in sixth.
Here’s the librarians’ list. Each author is followed by the number of short stories he published in The New Yorker during his career (or to date):
1. James Thurber—273
2. S.J. Perelman—272
3. John O’Hara—227
4. Frank Sullivan—192
5. E.B. White—183
6. John Updike—168
Now, there’s a reading list! (Albeit an all-male one.)
Thanks, Emily (and Erin and Jon), for setting me straight!
Banned Words and Phrases: More Things That Are Not One Word
“Eachother,” “sortof,” “nevermind” (I know that’s how Kurt spelled it, but I’m afraid he was wrong), “highschool,” and especially “moreso.” All are in fact two words, not one. The last of these non-words appears frequently in my statistics tracker — people google “moreso one word?” — and I’m glad they’re double-checking, because, as you know, it is not. That’sall fornow. See how typing that way makes you sound drunk? (More banned words and phrases, including “moreso,” which I include again to underscore its two-worded state. It’s overused anyway, don’t you think?)
The “Best American” Short Stories in The New Yorker, 1925 to the Present
Here’s an introductory post on our use of the Best American series of books.
Yesterday we brought you the New Yorker essays that were listed in Houghton Mifflin’s Best American Essays books; today, we do short stories.
If anything, The New Yorker‘s preeminence is even more pronounced in short fiction than it is in the essay form. The number of New Yorker stories either reprinted or selected as “Notables” is so high that it endangers the project of these posts, which is to reduce New Yorker output perceived as “must-read” to a more manageable quantity. I would certainly listen to a skeptic who contended that The New Yorker‘s dominance in this field is an exaggeration of the stories’ real worth. Let’s look at some numbers.
I only have data for five years as of this writing, all of them since 1998. Recently the tendency to select many, many New Yorker stories for the “Notables” section has gotten a little out of hand. Of the 54 stories that The New Yorker ran in 2004, Michael Chabon selected 30 as being “notable” or better. The year before, Lorrie Moore selected 31 of 56. I can see some logic in the argument that an outright majority of The New Yorker‘s stories is too many. However, the quality of the stories is the final arbiter; it is always possible that The New Yorker is simply having a good run.
The other years for which I have data are a bit more normal. Twenty a year seems to be a typical figure, and in my opinion this is a more reasonable number. If, as we add years, the number stays closer to twenty, then I think the list is a bit more useful. (We hear all the time from readers who find The New Yorker‘s weekly output overwhelming, so a smaller cut might be just what the doctor ordered.)
By the way, as The New Yorker is to other magazines, Alice Munro is to other writers. In only five years’ worth of data, Munro had a whopping eleven stories selected. (I would have guessed Updike, who had a mere seven.)
Houghton Mifflin’s Best American Short Stories series predates The New Yorker itself, going all the way back to 1915. So in theory, we may be able to post lists that cover The New Yorker‘s entire history. If you want to haunt your local library and help us secure this data, by all means send authors and titles (dates are not necessary) to martin@emdashes.com.
As always, we hope you find these useful. —Martin Schneider
“Best American Short Stories” originating in The New Yorker:
1939
Christopher Isherwood, “I Am Waiting,” 10/21/1939
1942
John Cheever, “The Pleasures of Solitude,” 1/24/1942
Irwin Shaw, “Preach on the Dusty Roads,” 8/22/1942
Grace Flandrau, “What Do You See, Dear Enid?” 9/26/1942
Jerome Weidman, “Philadelphia Express,” 10/10/1942
James Thurber, “The Catbird Seat,” 11/14/1942
1943
Astrid Meighan, “Shoe the Horse and Shoe the Mare,” 1/2/1943
Shirley Jackson, “Come Dance with Me in Ireland,” 5/15/1943
Hazel Hawthorne, “More Like a Coffin,” 6/26/1943
Elizabeth Parsons Warner, “An Afternoon,” 7/31/1943
Noel Houston, “A Local Skirmish,” 9/11/1943
Mary Mian, “Exiles from the Creuse,” 12/25/1943
1944
Leane Zugsmith, “This Is a Love Story,” 1/22/1944
Louis Bromfield, “Crime Passionnel,” 3/25/1944
Emily Hahn, “It Never Happened,” 6/24/1944
Carlos Bulosan, “My Brother Osong’s Career in Politics,” 7/22/1944
Irwin Shaw, “Gunners’ Passage,” 7/22/1944
Robert McLaughlin, “Poor Everybody,” 8/26/1944
John McNulty, “Don’t Scrub Off These Names,” 9/16/1944
1945
A.J. Liebling, “Run, Run, Run, Run,” 9/29/1945
1946
Irwin Shaw, “Act of Faith,” 2/2/1946
Victoria Lincoln, “Down in the Reeds by the River,” 9/28/1946
1947
John Cheever, “The Enormous Radio,” 5/17/1947
E.B. White, “The Second Tree from the Corner,” 5/31/1947
Ray Bradbury, “I See You Never,” 11/8/1947
1948
Jean Stafford, “Children Are Bored on Sunday,” 2/21/1948
Jessamyn West, “Road to the Isles,” 2/21/1948
1949
Edward Newhouse, “My Brother’s Second Funeral,” 10/8/1949
Peter Taylor, “A Wife of Nashville,” 12/3/1949
1950
John Cheever, “The Season of Divorce,” 3/4/1950
Nathan Asch, “Inland, Western Sea,” 4/29/1950
J.F. Powers, “Death of a Favorite,” 7/1/1950
Hortense Calisher, “In Greenwich, There Are Many Gravelled Walks,” 8/12/1950
Roger Angell, “Flight Through the Dark,” 12/9/1950
Jean Stafford, “The Nemesis,” 12/16/1950
1951
Jean Stafford, “The Healthiest Girl in Town,” 4/7/1951
Nancy Cardozo, “The Unborn Ghosts,” 6/30/1951
Elizabeth Enright, “The First Face,” 12/15/1951
1952
Robert M. Coates, “The Need,” 8/30/1952
Tennessee Williams, “Three Players of a Summer Game,” 11/1/1952
Christine Weston, “The Forest of the Night,” 11/22/1952
1954
Irwin Shaw, “Tip on a Dead Jockey,” 3/6/1954
Oliver La Farge, “The Resting Place,” 10/16/1954
John Cheever, “The Country Husband,” 11/20/1954
1957
Richard Thurman, “Not Another Word,” 5/25/1957
Jean Stafford, “A Reasonable Facsimile,” 8/3/1957
James Agee, “The Waiting,” 10/5/1957
Dorothy Parker, “The Banquet of Crow,” 12/14/1957
1958
Robert M. Coates, “Getaway,” 2/22/1958
John Cheever, “The Bella Lingua,” 3/1/1958
John Updike, “A Gift from the City,” 4/12/1958
1959
Philip Roth, “Defender of the Faith,” 3/14/1959
Elizabeth Hardwick, “The Purchase,” 5/30/1959
Mavis Gallant, “August,” 8/29/1959
1960
St. Clair McKelway, “First Marriage,” 4/2/1960
Mary Lavin, “The Yellow Beret,” 11/12/1960
Peter Taylor, “Miss Leonora When Last Seen,” 11/19/1960
1961
Mary Lavin, “In the Middle of the Fields,” 6/3/1961
Donald Hall, “A Day on Ragged,” 8/12/1961
John Updike, “Pigeon Feathers,” 8/19/1961
1964
Mary Lavin, “Heart of Gold,” 6/27/1964
Mary Lavin, “One Summer,” 9/11/1965
William Maxwell, “Further Tales About Men and Women,” 12/11/1965
1966
Ethan Ayer, “The Promise of Heat,” 9/3/1966
Berry Morgan, “Andrew,” 7/2/1966
Henry Roth, “The Surveyor,” 8/6/1966
1967
Joanna Ostrow, “Celtic Twilight,” 4/29/1967
1968
Maeve Brennan, “The Eldest Child,” 6/2/1968
Mary Lavin, “Happiness,” 12/14/1968
1971
Jose Yglesias, “The Guns in the Closet,” 11/20/1971
1973
Mary Lavin, “Tom,” 1/20/1973
John Updike, “Son,” 4/21/1973
Arturo Vivante, “Honeymoon,” 11/26/1973
1974
Alice Adams, “Roses, Rhododendron,” 1/27/1975
Donald Barthelme, “The School,” 6/17/1974
John Updike, “The Man Who Loved Extinct Mammals,” 7/21/1975
Lyll Becerra de Jenkins, “Tyranny,” 11/25/1974
1976
William Saroyan, “A Fresno Fable,” 1/19/1976
Patricia Hampl, “Look at a Teacup,” 6/28/1976
Anne Tyler, “Your Place Is Empty,” 11/22/1976
1977 (Ted Solotaroff, editor)
Mark Helprin, “The Schreuderspitze,” 1/10/1977
Peter Taylor, “In the Miro District,” 2/7/1977
Peter Marsh, “By the Yellow Lake,” 8/8/1977
Elizabeth Cullinan, “A Good Loser,” 8/15/1977
1978 (Joyce Carol Oates, editor)
Donald Barthelme, “The New Music,” 6/19/1978
Saul Bellow, “A Silver Dish, 9/25/1978
1980 (Hortense Calisher, editor)
Elizabeth McGrath, “Fogbound in Avalon,” 2/4/1980
Cynthia Ozick, “The Shawl,” 5/26/1980
Elizabeth Tallent, “Ice,” 9/15/1980
John Updike, “Still of Some Use,” 10/6/1980
Bobbie Ann Mason, “Shiloh,” 10/20/1980
Larry Woiwode, “Change,” 12/1/1980
Elizabeth Hardwick, “The Bookseller,” 12/15/1980
Joseph McElroy, “The Future,” 12/22/1980
1982 (Anne Tyler, editor)
Raymond Carver, “Where I’m Calling From,” 3/15/1982
Wright Morris, “Victrola,” 4/12/1982
Marian Thurm, “Starlight,” 5/10/1882
John Updike, “Deaths of Distant Friends,” 6/7/1982
Ursula K. Le Guin, “The Professor’s Houses,” 11/1/1982
Larry Woiwode, “Firstborn,” 11/22/1982
Bill Barich, “Hard to Be Good,” 12/20/1982
1983 (John Updike, editor)
Cynthia Ozick, “Rosa,” 3/21/1983
Norman Rush, “Bruins,” 4/4/1983
Susan Minot, “Thorofare,” 6/27/1983
Wright Morris, “Glimpse Into Another Country,” 9/26/1983
Mavis Gallant, “Lena,” 10/31/1983
1984 (Gail Godwin, editor)
Wright Morris, “Fellow-Creatures,” 12/31/1984
1985 (Raymond Carver, editor)
David Lipsky, “Three Thousand Dollars, 11/11/1985
Donald Barthelme, “Basil from Her Garden,” 11/21/1985
1986 (Ann Beattie, editor)
Raymond Carver, “Boxes,” 2/24/1986
Elizabeth Tallent, “Favor,” 4/21/1986
Mavis Gallant, “Kingdom Come,” 9/8/1986
John Updike, “The Afterlife,” 9/15/1986
Susan Sontag, “The Way We Live Now,” 11/24/1986
1987 (Mark Helprin, editor)
Mavis Gallant, “Dédé,” 1/5/1987
Raymond Carver, “Errand,” 6/1/1987
Robert Stone, “Helping,” 6/8/1987
1988 (Margaret Atwood, editor)
Michael Cunningham, “White Angel,” 7/25/1988
Mavis Gallant, “The Concert Party,” 1/25/1988
Alice Munro, “Meneseteung,” 1/11/1988
1990 (Alice Adams, editor)
Alice Munro, “Friend of My Youth,” 1/22/1990
Deborah Eisenberg, “The Custodian,” 3/12/1990
Lorrie Moore, “Willing,” 5/14/1990
John Updike, “A Sandstone Farmhouse,” 6/11/1990
Charles D’Ambrosio, Jr., “The Point,” 10/1/1990
Harriet Doerr, “Another Short Day in La Luz,” 12/24/1990
1994 (Jane Smiley, editor)
Steven Polansky, “Leg,” 1/24/1994
Thom Jones, “Way Down Deep in the Jungle,” 3/14/1994
Jamaica Kincaid, “Xuela,” 5/9/1994
1995 (John Edgar Wideman, editor)
Jamaica Kincaid, “In Roseau,” 4/17/1995
Robert Olen Butler, “Jealous Husband Returns in Form of Parrot,” 5/22/1995
Angela Patrinos, “Sculpture 1,” 7/24/1995
Stuart Dybek, “Paper Lantern,” 11/27/1995
1996 (E. Annie Proulx, editor)
Richard Bausch, “Nobody in Hollywood,” 5/13/1996
Cynthia Ozick, “Save My Child!” 6/24/1996
T. Coraghessan Boyle, “Killing Babies,” 12/2/1996
1997 (Garrison Keillor, editor)
Lorrie Moore, “People Like That Are the Only People Here,” 1/27/1997
John Updike, “My Father on the Verge of Disgrace,” 3/10/1997
Chris Adrian, “Every Night for a Thousand Years: a Story of the Civil War,” 10/6/1997
1998 (Amy Tan, editor)
Junot Diaz, “The Sun, the Moon, the Stars,” 2/2/1998
Amy Bloom, “Night Vision,” 2/16/1998
John Updike, “Natural Color,” 3/23/1998
Jhumpa Lahiri, “A Temporary Matter,” 4/20/1998
Annie Proulx, “The Mud Below,” 6/22/1998
Alice Munro, “Save the Reaper,” 6/22/1998
David Long, “Morphine,” 7/20/1998
Louise Erdrich, “Naked Woman Playing Chopin,” 7/27/1998
Lorrie Moore, “Real Estate,” 8/17/1998
Gish Jen, “Who’s Irish?,” 9/14/1998
Tim O’Brien, “The Streak,” 9/28/1998
Cynthia Ozick, “Actors,” 10/5/1998
Alice Munro, “Cortes Island,” 10/12/1998
T. Coraghessan Boyle, “Mexico,” 10/19/1998
Mary Gaitskill, “A Dream of Men,” 11/23/1998
Annie Proulx, “The Bunchgrass Edge of the World,” 11/30/1998
Julie Hecht, “Over There,” 12/7/1998
Richard Ford, “Creche,” 12/28/1998
Jhumpa Lahiri, “Sexy,” 12/28/1998
1999 (E.L. Doctorow, editor)
Allan Gurganus, “He’s at the Office,” 2/15/1999
Aleksandar Hemon, “Blind Jozef Pronek,” 4/19/1999
Jhumpa Lahiri, “The Third and Final Continent,” 6/21/1999
Junot Diaz, “Nilda,” 10/4/1999
Walter Mosley, “Pet Fly,” 12/13/1999
2000 (Barbara Kingsolver, editor)
Richard Ford, “Quality Time,” 1/31/2000
Andrea Lee, “Brothers and Sisters Around the World,” 2/7/2000
Alice Munro, “Nettles,” 2/21/2000
T. Coraghessan Boyle, “The Love of My Life,” 3/6/2000
Alice McDermott, “Enough,” 4/10/2000
Louise Erdrich, “Revival Road,” 4/17/2000
Tom Drury, “Chemistry,” 4/24/2000
Matthew Klam, “European Wedding,” 5/8/2000
Richard Ford, “Reunion,” 5/15/2000
John Updike, “Personal Archeology,” 5/29/2000
ZZ Packer, “Drinking Coffee Elsewhere,” 6/19/2000
David Schickler, “The Smoker,” 6/19/2000
Lucinda Rosenfeld, “The Male Gaze,” 7/3/2000
Andrea Lee, “Interesting Women,” 7/17/2000
Alice Munro, “Floating Bridge,” 7/31/2000
Tim O’Brien, “Winnipeg,” 8/14/2000
Edwidge Danticat, “Water Child,” 9/11/2000
Robert J. Lennon, “No Life,” 9/11/2000
Marisa Silver, “What I Saw from Where I Stood,” 10/30/2000
Ann Beattie, “The Women of This World,” 11/20/2000
Tobias Wolff, “The Most Basic Plan,” 11/27/2000
Alice Munro, “Post and Beam,” 12/11/2000
Junot Diaz, “The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao,” 12/25/2000
Richard Ford, “Calling,” 12/25/2000
2001 (Sue Miller, editor)
John Updike, “Free,” 1/8/2001
Richard Yates, “The Canal,” 1/15/2001
Andrea Lee, “The Birthday Present,” 1/22/2001
Stephen King, “All That You Love Will Be Carried Away,” 1/29/2001
Alice Munro, “What Is Remembered,” 2/19/2001
Jhumpa Lahiri, “Nobody’s Business,” 3/12/2001
John Updike, “The Guardians,” 3/26/2001
Ann Beattie, “That Last Odd Day in L.A.,” 4/16/2001
E.L. Doctorow, “A House on the Plains,” 6/18/2001
Nell Freudenberger, “Lucky Girls,” 6/18/2001
Alice Munro, “Family Furnishings,” 7/23/2001
Arthur Miller, “Bulldog,” 8/13/2001
Edwidge Danticat, “Seven,” 10/1/2001
Alice Munro, “Comfort,” 10/8/2001
Louise Erdrich, “The Butcher’s Wife,” 10/15/2001
Ann Beattie, “Find and Replace,” 11/5/2001
Leonard Michaels, “Nachman from Los Angeles,” 11/12/2001
Michael Chabon, “Along the Frontage Road,” 11/19/2001
Akhil Sharma, “Surrounded by Sleep,” 12/10/2001
2002 (Walter Mosley, editor)
David Schickler, “Jamaica,” 1/7/2002
Sam Shepard, “An Unfair Question,” 3/11/2002
E.L. Doctorow, “Baby Wilson,” 3/25/2002
Don DeLillo, “Baader-Meinhof,” 4/1/2002
Leonard Michaels, “Of Mystery There Is No End,” 4/8/2002
Arthur Miller, “The Performance,” 4/22/2002
Andrea Lee, “The Prior’s Room,” 5/6/2002
Grace Paley, “My Father Addresses Me On the Facts of Old Age,” 6/17/2002
Robert Stone, “Fun With Problems,” 7/15/2002
Alice Munro, “Fathers,” 8/5/2002
Frederick Reiken, “The Ocean,” 9/9/2002
Jessica Shattuck, “Bodies,” 9/30/2002
Charles D’Ambrosio, “Drummond & Son,” 10/7/2002
Aleksandar Hemon, “The Bees, Part I,” 10/14/2002
Maile Meloy, “Travis, B.,” 10/28/2002
Antonya Nelson, “Only a Thing,” 11/4/2002
T. Coraghessan Boyle, “Dogology,” 11/11/2002
James Salter, “Last Night,” 11/18/2002
ZZ Packer, “The Ant of the Self,” 11/25/2002
Louise Erdrich, “Shamengwa,” 12/2/2002
2003 (Lorrie Moore, editor)
John Updike, “Sin: Early Impressions,” 12/9/2003
Arthur Miller, “The Bare Manuscript,” 12/16/2003
Annie Proulx, “The Trickle-Down Effect,” 12/23/2002
E.L. Doctorow, “Jolene: A Life,” 12/23/2002
Thomas McGuane, “Gallatin Canyon,” 1/13/2003
George Saunders, “Jon,” 1/27/2003
Charles D’Ambrosio, “The High Divide,” 2/3/2003
Louise Erdrich, “The Painted Drum,” 3/3/2003
Caitlin Macy, “Christie,” 3/10/2003
David Schickler, “Wes Amerigo’s Giant Fear,” 3/17/2003
T. Coraghessan Boyle, “When I Woke Up This Morning, Everything I Had Was Gone,” 3/31/2003
Margot Livesey, “The Niece,” 4/7/2003
Maile Meloy, “Red from Green,” 4/14/2003
Sherman Alexie, “What You Pawn I Will Redeem,” 4/21/2003
Antonya Nelson, “Dick,” 5/5/2003
E.L. Doctorow, “Walter John Harmon,” 5/12/2003
David Bezmogis, “Tapka,” 5/19/2003
Heather Clay, “Original Beauty,” 6/16/2003
Lara Vapnyar, “Love Lessons Mondays, 9 a.m.,” 6/16/2003
Stephen King, “Harvey’s Dream,” 6/30/2003
John Updike, “The Walk With Elizanne,” 7/7/2003
Tobias Wolff, “The Benefit of the Doubt,” 7/14/2003
Edward P. Jones, “A Rich Man,” 8/4/2003
Alice Munro, “Runaway,” 8/11/2003
Annie Proulx, “What Kind of Furniture Would Jesus Pick?” 8/18/2003
Dave Eggers, “Measuring the Jump,” 9/1/2003
Kevin Brockmeier, “The Brief History of the Dead,” 9/8/2003
Thomas McGuane, “Vicious Circle,” 9/22/2003
Louise Erdrich, “Love Snares,” 10/27/2003
Tony Earley, “Have You Seen the Stolen Girl?” 11/3/2003
T. Coraghessan Boyle, “Tooth and Claw,” 11/10/2003
Charles D’Ambrosio, “Screenwriter,” 12/8/2003
Edward P. Jones, “All Aunt Hagar’s Children,” 12/22/2003
Yiyun Li, “Extra,” 12/22/2003
Lorrie Moore, “Debarking,” 12/22/2003
2004 (Michael Chabon, editor)
Lara Vapnyar, “Broccoli,” 1/5/2004
Chang-Rae Lee, “Daisy,” 1/12/2004
George Saunders, “Bohemians,” 1/19/2004
John Updike, “Delicate Wives,” 2/2/2004
Andrea Lee, “La Ragazza,” 2/16/2004
T. Coraghessan Boyle, “Chicxulub,” 3/1/2004
Alice Munro, “Passion,” 3/22/2004
Jim Harrison , “Father Daughter,” 3/29/2004
Jonathan Lethem, “Super Goat Man,” 4/5/2004
Ann Beattie, “The Rabbit Hole as Likely Explanation,” 4/12/2004
Edward P. Jones, “Old Boys,” Old Girls,” 5/3/2004
Andrew Sean Greer, “The Islanders,” 5/17/2004
Jhumpa Lahiri, “Hell-Heaven,” 5/24/2004
David Means, “The Secret Goldfish,” 5/31/2004
Aleksandar Hemon, “Szmura’s Room,” 6/14/2004
Alice Munro, “Chance,” 6/14/2004
Alice Munro, “Silence,” 6/14/2004
Alice Munro, “Soon,” 6/14/2004
Louise Erdrich, “The Plague of Doves,” 6/28/2004 (audio)
John Updike, “Elsie by Starlight,” 7/5/2004
Judy Burnitz, “Miracle,” 7/12/2004
Annie Proulx, “Man Crawling Out of Trees,” 7/26/2004
Richard Ford, “The Shore,” 8/2/2004
George Saunders, “Adams,” 8/9/2004
Gina Oschner, “The Fractious South,” 8/23/2004
Joyce Carol Oates, “Spider Boy,” 9/20/2004
Charles D’Ambrosio, “The Scheme of Things,” 10/11/2004
Thomas McGuane, “Old Friends,” 10/25/2004
Alan Gurganus, “My Heart is a Snake Farm,” 11/22/2004
Edward P. Jones, “Adam Robinson,” 12/20/2004
The “Best American” Essays in The New Yorker, 1985 to the Present
I was happy to see Emily’s statement of allegiance to The New Yorker at The Millions the other day. For that matter, I was heartened to C. Max Magee launch such an impassioned argument in favor of the magazine. While I fully agree with him, it’s occurred to me before that there are more objective measures of the quality of The New Yorker. Two years ago now, I tried to summon a collection of like-minded readers around the project of isolating the finest treasures in The Complete New Yorker. Later, I realized that that group had already coalesced here at Emdashes; what’s more, others had already done much of the work of isolating the best work that has appeared in the magazine.
You’re familiar with Houghton Mifflin’s annual “Best American” anthology series. Not too long ago, there was only The Best American Essays and The Best American Short Stories. Today, the series have proliferated, in more ways than one. Houghton Mifflin has branched out into The Best American Mystery Stories, The Best American Sports Writing, The Best American Nonrequired Reading, The Best American Comics, and so on. Meanwhile, other presses, noticing the popularity of the line, have followed suit: Da Capo now has a Best Music Writing series, Harper Perennial has its own Best American Science Writing series (Houghton Mifflin’s counterpart is called The Best American Science and Nature Writing), and so on. It’s become a crowded field.
As a rule, each series has a general editor, and every year a prominent practitioner of the art is asked to serve as guest editor. In each Best American Essays (or whatever), approximately a score of exemplars is selected to be reprinted, along with—important for my purposes—several dozen also-rans listed in the back of the book.
It will come as no surprise to anyone who has leafed through these books that The New Yorker regularly dominates them. It is the rare table of contents that does not feature an artifact from The New Yorker, more commonly two or three. The also-rans in the back also invariably feature a handful of additional gems that originally appeared in The New Yorker.
I would never claim that these selections are the final word on the subject. Surely The New Yorker and other outlets benefit from familiarity, and surely reasons that are not purely quality-based might account for this or that article or story being selected over another. Sometimes the selections seem more notable for their ability to get people talking than strict level of achievement. The guest editors are idiosyncratic; nobody’s perfect.
Nevertheless, in the aggregate the baseline quality represented in a listing of all of The New Yorker‘s selected essays or stories is simply very high. No matter how you cut it, these books are a tremendous resource for anyone seeking the best writing from the magazine over the last two decades or so.
And every last one of them is in The Complete New Yorker.
For that reason, I have sought to provide a list of the pieces from The New Yorker that have been deemed worthy of inclusion over the years. There are many; the length of the list is itself a proof of the claim that The New Yorker is superlative.
As of now, there are gaps. Anyone with a yen to trudge off to the library and jot down some authors and titles (dates I can get on my own) and then e-mail them to martin@emdashes.com is incredibly welcome to do so. I promise to add the entries to this post with alacrity, with credit. (Note that the items in this list dated, say, 2001 appeared in the collection with the year 2002 printed on the cover.) The essays are listed chronologically, so the merest glance will reveal the years I have not yet been able to secure. Please report the inevitable errors to the same address. Outright selections and also-rans are listed without noting which is which—they’re all gonna be good, right? [Update: I’ve changed my mind on this; selected essays, where available, are set in italics. —MCS]
The list can fulfill multiple purposes, of course; if you are worried about missing gems in general, this list will help you catch up. But even if you want to indulge your skeptical side and test whether that overhyped John Updike or Cynthia Ozick is really any good; well, here are the certified hits. They might not be the most exceptional works that Updike or Ozick ever wrote, but somebody clearly thought they were pretty good. I swoon at the very thought of the reading lists (a handy feature of the CNY) this post may inspire. Calvin Trillin, Adam Gopnik, Alice Munro, Roger Angell—you could generate a short reading list for each of them, and many more.
I sincerely hope readers find this list useful. More are on the way. —Martin Schneider
“Best American Essays” originating in The New Yorker:
1985 (Elizabeth Hardwick, editor)
Calvin Trillin, “Right-of-Way,” 5/6/1985
John Updike, “At War with My Skin,” 9/2/1985
Ian Frazier, “Bear News,” 9/9/1985
Joseph Brodsky, “Flight from Byzantium,” 10/28/1985
1986 (Gay Talese, editor)
Calvin Trillin, “Rumors Around Town,” 1/6/1986
Adam Gopnik, “Quattrocento Baseball,” 5/19/1986
Anthony Bailey, “A Good Little Vessel,” 6/2/1986
Vicki Hearne, “Questions about Language,” 8/18/1985
Berton Roueche, “Marble Stories,” 10/27/1986
William Pfaff, “The Dimensions of Terror,” 11/10/1986
Calvin Trillin, “The Life and Times of Joe Bob Briggs, So Far,” 12/22/1986
1987 (Annie Dillard, editor)
E.J. Kahn Jr., “The Honorable Member for Houghton” 4/20/1987
Harold Brodkey, “Reflections: Family.” 11/23/1987
Susan Sontag, “Pilgrimage,” 12/21/1987
1988 (Geoffrey Wolff, editor)
Veronica Geng, “A Lot in Common,” 1/25/1988
Calvin Trillin, “Stranger in Town,” 2/1/1988
E.J. Kahn Jr., “Hand to Hand,” 2/8/1988
George W.S. Trow Jr., “Subway Story,” 2/22/1988
Dan Hofstadter, “Omnivores, 4/25/1988
Gwen Kinkead, “An Overgrown Jack,” 7/18/1988
Robert Shaplen, “The Long River,” 8/8/1988
Joan Didion, “Letter from Los Angeles,” 9/5/1988
Berton Rouech�, “The Foulest and Nastiest Creatures that Be,” 9/12/1988
Jane Kramer, “Letter from Europe: West Berlin,” 11/28/1988
1989 (Justin Kaplan, editor)
Frances FitzGerald, “Memoirs of the Reagan Era,” 1/16/1989
Robert Heilbroner, “The Triumph of Capitalism,” 1/23/1989
Calvin Trillin, “Abigail y Yo,” 6/26/1989
Roger Angell, “No, But I Saw the Game,” 7/31/1989
Sue Hubbell, “The Vicksburg Ghost,” 9/25/1989
Cynthia Ozick, “T.S. Eliot at 101,” 11/20/1989
1990 (Joyce Carol Oates, editor)
Joan Didion, “Letter from Los Angeles,” 2/26/1990
John McPhee, “Travels of the Rock,” 2/26/1990
Michael J. Arlen, “Invisible People,” 4/16/1990
Ian Frazier, “Canal Street,” 4/30/1990
Terrence Rafferty, “The Essence of Landscape,” 6/25/1990
George W. S. Trow, “Devastation,” 10/22/1990
Calvin Trillin, “The Italian Thing,” 11/19/1990
1991 (Susan Sontag, editor)
Jane Kramer, “Letter from Europe,” 1/14/1991
Muriel Spark, “The School of the Links,” 3/25/1991
Roger Angell, “Homeric Tales,” 5/27/1991
Susan Orlean, “Living Large,” 6/17/1991
George W. S. Trow, “Needs,” 10/14/1991
Adam Gopnik, “Audubon’s Passion,” 12/25/1991
1992 (Joseph Epstein, editor)
Roger Angell, “Early Innings,” 2/24/1992
Alastair Reid, “Waiting for Columbus,” 2/24/1992
Oliver Sacks, “A Surgeon’s Life,” 3/16/1992
Cynthia Ozick, “Alfred Chester’s Wig,” 3/30/1992
David Owen, “One-Ring Mud Show,” 4/20/1992
David Rieff, “Original Virtue, Original Sin,” 11/23/1992
1993 (Tracy Kidder, editor)
Calvin Trillin, “The First Family of Astoria,” 2/8/1993
A. Alvarez, “The Dark at the Top of the Stairs,” 3/8/1993
Jamaica Kincaid, “Alien Soil,” 6/21/1993
Harold Brodkey, “To My Readers,” 6/21/1993
John McPhee, “Duty of Care,” 6/28/1993
Edward Conlon, “To the Potter’s Field,” 7/19/1993
Joan Didion, “Trouble in Lakewood,” 7/26/1993
Adam Gopnik, “Death in Venice,” 8/2/1993
Ted Conover, “Trucking Through the AIDS Belt,” 8/16/1993
David Denby, “Does Homer Have Legs?” 9/6/1993
Ian Frazier, “The Frankest Interview Yet,” 9/27/1993
Alec Wilkinson, “The Confession,” 10/4/1993
F. Gonzalez-Crussi, “Days of the Dead,” 11/1/1993
Cynthia Ozick, “Rushdie in the Louvre,” 12/13/1993
John McPhee, “Irons in the Fire,” 12/20/1993
Linda H. Davis, “The Man on the Swing,” 12/27/1993
1994 (Jamaica Kincaid, editor)
Harold Brodkey, “Dying: An Update,” 2/7/1994
Alfred Kazin, “Jews,” 3/7/1994
Louis Menand, “The War of All Against All,” 3/14/1994
Henry Louis Gates, Jr., “In the Kitchen,” 4/18/1994
John Edgar Wideman, “Father Stories,” 8/1/1994
David Denby, “Queen Lear,” 10/3/1994
Jamaica Kincaid, “Earthly Delights,” 12/12/1994
1995 (Geoffrey C. Ward, editor)
Harold Brodkey, “The Last Word on Winchell,” 1/30/1995
Ian Frazier, “Take the F,” 2/20/1995
Jamaica Kincaid, “Putting Myself Together,” 2/20/1995
Calvin Trillin, “State Secrets,” 5/29/1995
Nicholson Baker, “Books as Furniture,” 6/12/1995
Amitav Ghosh, “The Ghosts of Mrs. Gandhi,” 7/17/1995
William Styron, “A Case of the Great Pox,” 9/18/1995
Adam Gopnik, “Wonderland,” 10/9/1995
Chang-Rae Lee, “Coming Home Again,” 10/16/1995
Joyce Carol Oates, “They All Just Went Away,” 10/16/1995
Joan Acocella, “Cather and the Academy,” 11/27/1995
John Irving, “Slipped Away,” 12/11/1995
1996 (Ian Frazier, editor)
Roger Angell, “True Tales—Well, Maybe,” 1/22/1996
Harold Brodkey, “This Wild Darkness,” 2/5/1996
Paul Sheehan, “My Habit,” 2/12/1996
Jane Kramer, “The Invisible Woman,” 2/26/1996
Francine du Plessix Gray, “The Third Age,” 2/26/1996
Daphne Merkin, “Unlikely Obsession,” 2/26/1996
Marjorie Gross, “Cancer Becomes Me,” 4/15/1996
Jonathan Raban, “The Unlamented West,” 5/20/1996
Jo Ann Beard, “The Fourth State of Matter,” 6/24/1996
David Denby, “Buried Alive,” 7/15/1996
Kathryn Harrison, “Tick,” 7/29/1996
Calvin Trillin, “Anne of Red Hair,” 8/5/1996
Alison Rose, “Bathing-Suit Heroines,” 8/12/1996
Garry Wills, “John Wayne’s Body,” 8/19/1996
Vivian Gornick, “On the Street,” 9/9/1996
Richard Ford, “In the Face,” 9/16/1996
Cynthia Ozick, “A Drugstore Eden,” 9/16/1996
Hilton Als, “Notes on My Mother,” 11/18/1996
1997 (Cynthia Ozick, editor)
James Atlas, “Making the Grade,” 4/14/1997
Adam Gopnik, “Appointment with a Dinosaur,” 4/21/1997
John McPhee, “Silk Parachute,” 5/12/1997
Alison Rose, “Tales of a Beauty,” 5/26/1997
Oliver Sacks, “Water Babies,” 5/26/1997
Diana Trilling, “A Visit to Camelot,” 6/2/1997
Noelle Oxenhandler, “Fall from Grace,” 6/16/1997
David Denby, “In Darwin’s Wake,” 7/21/1997
Andre Dubus, “Witness,” 7/21/1997
Patrick McGrath, “Jealousy,” 8/25/1997
Cynthia Ozick, “Lovesickness,” 8/25/1997
Henry Louis Gates Jr., “The Naked Republic,” 8/25/1997
Salman Rushdie, “Crash,” 9/15/1997
John Updike, “Lost Art,” 12/15/1997
1998 (Edward Hoagland, editor)
Bill Buford, “Thy Neighbor’s Life,” 1/5/1998
Henry Louis Gates, Jr., “The End of Loyalty,” 3/8/1998
Arthur Miller, “Before Air-Conditioning,” 6/22/1998
John McPhee, “Swimming with Canoes,” 8/10/1998
Richard Ford, “Good Raymond,” 10/5/1998
Joan Didion, “Last Words,” 11/9/1998
John Lahr, “The Lion and Me,” 11/16/1998
Andre Aciman, “In Search of Proust,” 12/21/1998
George W.S. Trow, “Folding the Times,” 12/28/1998
1999 (Alan Lightman, editor)
Calvin Trillin, “The Chicken Vanishes,” 2/8/1999
Alec Wilkinson, “Notes Left Behind,” 2/15/1999
Hilton Als, “The Dope Show,” 2/22/1999
Cynthia Ozick, “The Synthetic Sublime,” 2/22/1999
Joseph Epstein, “Taking the Bypass,” 4/12/1999
Daphne Merkin, “Our Money, Ourselves,” 4/26/1999
Malcolm Gladwell, “The Physical Genius,” 8/2/1999
Bill Buford, “Lions and Tigers and Bears,” 8/23/1999
Henry Louis Gates Jr., “Rope Burn,” 8/23/1999
John Seabrook, “Nobrow Culture,” 9/20/1999
John McPhee, “Farewell to the Nineteenth Century,” 9/27/1999
Adam Gopnik, “The Rookie,” 10/4/1999
Dave Eggers, “The Orphans Are Coming!” 10/18/1999
John Updike, “The Future of Faith,” 11/29/1999
Oliver Sacks, “Brilliant Light,” 12/20/1999
2000 (Kathleen Norris, editor)
Dagoberto Gilb, “I Knew She Was Beautiful,” 3/13/2000
John McPhee, “They’re in the River,” 4/10/2000
Marcus Laffey, “The Midnight Tour,” 5/15/2000
Edward Hoagland, “Calliope Times,” 5/22/2000
Stephen King, “On Impact,” 6/19/2000
Tony Earley, “Granny’s Bridge,” 7/3/2000
Andre Aciman, “Arbitrage,” 7/10/2000
Mary Karr, “The Hot Dark,” 9/4/2000
Daphne Merkin, “Trouble in the Tribe,” 9/11/2000
2001 (Stephen Jay Gould, editor)
Daphne Merkin, “The Black Season,” 1/8/2001
Jamaica Kincaid, “Sowers and Reapers,” 1/22/2001
Darryl Pinckney, “Busted in New York,” 2/5/2001
Atul Gawande, “Final Cut,” 3/19/2001
Susan Sontag, “Where the Stress Falls,” 6/18/2001
Eric Konigsberg, “Blood Relation,” 8/6/2001
David Samuels, “The Runner,” 9/3/2001
Jonathan Franzen, “My Father’s Brain,” 9/10/2001
Adam Gopnik, “The City and the Pillars,” 9/24/2001
2002 (Anne Fadiman, editor)
Atul Gawande, “The Learning Curve,” 1/28/2002
Judith Thurman, “Swann Song,” 3/18/2002
Alice Munro, “Lying Under the Apple Tree,” 6/17/2002
Donald Antrim, “I Bought a Bed,” 6/17/2002
Katha Pollitt, “Learning to Drive,” 7/22/2002
Jane Kramer, “The Reporter’s Kitchen,” 8/19/2002
Cathleen Schine, “The ‘Holy Ground,'” 9/16/2002
Adam Gopnik, “Bumping Into Mr. Ravioli,” 9/30/2002
Oliver Sacks, “The Case of Anna H.,” 10/7/2002
Jerome Groopman, “Dying Words,” 10/28/2002
Gay Talese, “On the Bridge,” 12/2/2002
Ian Frazier, “Researchers Say,” 12/9/2002
2003 (Louis Menand, editor)
Scott Turow, “To Kill or Not To Kill,” 1/6/2003
Adam Gopnik, “The Unreal Thing,” 5/19/2003
Roger Angell, “Romance,” 5/26/2003
Susan Orlean, “Lifelike,” 6/9/2003
David Sedaris, “Our Perfect Summer,” 6/16/2003
Jonathan Franzen, “Caught,” 6/16/2003
Cynthia Ozick, “What Helen Keller Saw,” 6/16/2003
Laura Hillenbrand, “A Sudden Illness,” 7/7/2003
Alex Ross, “Rock 101,” 7/14/2003
Oliver Sacks, “The Mind’s Eye,” 7/28/2003
Cynthia Zarin, “An Enlarged Heart,” 8/18/2003
Don DeLillo, “That Day in Rome,” 10/20/2003
John McPhee, “1839/2003,” 12/15/2003
George Saunders, “Chicago Christmas, 1984,” 12/22/2003
2004 (Susan Orlean, editor)
Cathleen Schine, “Dog Trouble,” 1/5/2004
Katha Pollitt, “Webstalker,” 1/19/2004
Roger Angell, “La Vie en Rose,” 2/16/2004
Alex Ross, “Listen to This,” 2/16/2004
Donald Antrim, “The Kimono,” 3/15/2004
Adam Gopnik, “Last of the Metrozoids,” 5/10/2004
Simon Schama, “Sail Away,” 5/31/2004
Robert Stone, “The Prince of Possibility,” 6/14/2004
Joan Acocella, “Blocked,” 6/14/2004
Caitliin Flanagan, “To Hell With All That,” 7/5/2004
Oliver Sacks, “Speed,” 8/23/2004
Malcolm Gladwell, “The Ketchup Conundrum,” 9/6/2004
Calvin Trillin, “Dissed Fish,” 9/6/2004
Calvin Tomkins, “Summer Afternoon,” 9/13/2004
David Sedaris, “Old Faithful,” 11/29/2004
Jonathan Franzen, “The Comfort Zone,” 11/29/2004
2005 (Lauren Slater, editor)
Ian Frazier, “Out of Ohio,” 1/10/2005
Oscar Hijuelos, “Lunch at the Biltmore,” 1/17/2005
Roger Angell, “Andy,” 2/14/2005
Susan Orlean, “Lost Dog,” 2/14/2005
Jonathan Lethem, “The Beards,” 2/28/2005
Jonathan Franzen, “The Retreat,” 6/6/2005
Edmund White, “My Women,” 6/13/2005
Adam Gopnik, “Death of a Fish,” 7/4/2005
Oliver Sacks, “Recalled to Life,” 10/31/2005
2006 (David Foster Wallace, editor)
Calvin Trillin, “Alice, Off the Page,” 3/27/2006
Daniel Raeburn, “Vessels,” 5/1/2006
Malcolm Gladwell, “What the Dog Saw,” 5/22/2006
Louis Menand, “Name that Tone,” 6/26/2006
John Lahr, “Petrified,” 8/28/2006
Richard Preston, “Tall for Its Age,” 10/9/2006
Jill Lepore, “Noah’s Mark,” 11/6/2006
David Sedaris, “Road Trips,” 11/27/2006
Many, many thanks to Benjamin Chambers of The King’s English for fully nine of the years listed here. It made all the difference.
Avenue Queue: Special Festival Report From the Front (& Middle & Back of the) Line
I had the privilege to meet the talented young writer Ben Bass after the Steve Martin event at the New Yorker Festival this past weekend. Ben was kind enough to send me his report from the impressive–in length and in fervor–line that formed on the festival’s opening day.
When advance tickets for the eighth annual New Yorker Festival weekend went on sale online, events sold out quickly. Happily, more tickets were released on the weekend in question, and so it was that a line formed outside Metropolitan Pavilion on West 18th Street on the first day of the Festival.
First in the queue was Eileen Fishman of North Caldwell, New Jersey, who arrived four hours before tickets went on sale. Unlike others in line, who stood or sat on the pavement, she surveyed the landscape from the nylon comfort of a Tanglewood-appropriate collapsible lounge chair. Someone observed that Fishman looked like a hardcore fan camping out for Bruce Springsteen tickets at the Meadowlands. “I bought this chair around the corner at Bed Bath & Beyond,” she explained. “My kids are coming in from Boston and I want to get Calvin Trillin tickets.”
Arriving early was a wise move. There was room for only thirty people at this year’s version of Trillin’s popular gastronomic walking tour, and magazine insiders were rumored nearly to have cornered the market. Tickets to it are an October tradition not unlike the post-season base hits of Alex Rodríguez: more talked about than seen.
The Festival also evoked Yankee Stadium in the way that it brought families together. Lisa Kittrell of Mississippi, seventh in line, chose this weekend to visit her daughter, an NYU film student. “She told me she’d go to Miranda July with me if I went to Judd Apatow with her,” said Kittrell, who was attending her fourth straight Festival.
As the line slowly lengthened in the bright October sunshine, people settled in for an afternoon of purposeful idling. One might have expected to find some of them reading this magazine, but iPod listening and text messaging were the distractions of choice, and the most prominent magazines on display were Us Weekly and InStyle. “When you go see a band, you don’t wear their T-shirt,” explained Angie Rondeau, 28, an Oxford Press production editor who nonetheless was furtively perusing a New Yorker article on Elizabeth LeCompte.
Not everyone agreed with Rondeau’s fashion mandate against bringing coals to Newcastle. Suzanne Undy, a freelance writer fifteenth in line, was clad in a New Yorker T-shirt emblazoned with a George Booth dog drawing. She was waiting to buy tickets to see Jeffrey Eugenides and Oliver Sacks. “Everything sells out so quickly,” said the first-time Festival attendee, sounding like a veteran.
Wearing a Los Alamos National Laboratory polo shirt, Columbia M.D.-Ph.D. student Sean Escola, 26, whiled away the time working on a full-page theoretical neuroscience problem resembling the contents of a blackboard in a Pat Byrnes cartoon. Blithely unaware of the attractive fellow student forty spots behind him in line with an “I Love Nerds” button on her backpack, Escola (who, in fairness, projected a certain Weezeresque charisma) was third in line, well positioned for tickets to the Icelandic music group Sigur Rós. Their two Festival concerts had sold out online in seconds.
Hoboken’s Carter Frank, thirty-eighth in line, was buying tickets to see a panel of television writers. “I’ve got a soft spot for David Milch since he hired my daughter as a writing intern on John From Cincinnati,” she said. Asked whether she’d read the magazine’s recent Milch profile, she replied, “They got his bad back right. He interviewed my daughter lying flat on the floor.”
As the sun beat down and ennui mounted, patrons become more forthcoming with their petty New Yorker grievances, both Festival and magazine. Josh Frankel, 19, a Drew University economics major, complained that The New Yorker had attracted too much attention to his favorite hidden gem, the Brooklyn Heights restaurant Noodle Pudding.
“They ruined it,” he said. “They put a profile right in the front of the magazine and now you can’t get a table there after 5 p.m.” Princeton senior Amelia Salyers, twentieth in line, expressed dismay that Salman Rushdie and Junot Díaz were appearing at the same time; they represented two-thirds of her thesis topic, along with Vladimir Nabokov.
Less conciliatory was Marty Katz of Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, a perennially frustrated online Festival ticket buyer. “It sucks,” he said. “They should get a bigger venue.”
Predictably, the media-centric weekend spectacle also attracted Fourth Estate types, though relatively few from breakaway former Soviet republics. Shorena Shaverdashvili was covering the Festival for a literary magazine in Georgia, “the country, not the state.” Shaverdashvili, the magazine’s publisher, winkingly disavowed any conflict of interest in awarding herself the New York City weekend gig. “I just subscribed to The New Yorker because they added Georgia,” she said. “I used to have to buy it in airports or get my friend to send it to me.”
Shortly before tickets went on sale, the door to the Pavilion swung open and patrons were ushered inside. As the line started moving, a burly security guard tried to maintain open space in front of the building next door, where an Hermès sample sale was attracting a steady stream of customers. “You wouldn’t think these Hermès ladies would be that tough, but they are,” muttered the guard. “One lady this morning almost knocked an old man over. She said she was a columnist from the Post so I should let her in early. I told her to come back when we were open.”
Finally it was 3 p.m. and the ticket counter opened for business. The Festival was underway. —Ben Bass
Ask the Librarians (VI)
A column in which Jon Michaud and Erin Overbey, The New Yorker’s head librarians, answer your questions about the magazine’s past and present. E-mail your own questions for Jon and Erin; the column has now moved to The New Yorker‘s Back Issues blog. Illustration for Emdashes by Lara Tomlin; other images are courtesy of The New Yorker.
Q. When did The New Yorker start publishing letters to the editor? Did it publish letters in any form before that?
Erin writes: The Letters to the Editor department has had several incarnations at the magazine. In the twenties and thirties, the magazine published occasional letters to the editor, but no consistent weekly column from readers. These early letters were usually quite brief and appeared under headings like “The Amateur Reporter” or “Our Captious Readers.” Some of them were actually parodies written by New Yorker staffers under pseudonyms; a typical example is this excerpt from a letter, written by “Rye Face,” in the March 13, 1926, issue:
That smart New Yorkers read your confounded paper may be true. But why imply that decent people would become smart if they read it? Dammit, I read it. And I am a bootlegger. And practically all bootleggers and others with a sense of humor read it. Accept my sincerest expressions of disgust. THE NEW YORKER is not smart. Please have the decency to cease from accusing the honest people who support your senseless waggery with their good cash of vices they don’t possess. We may not be perfect but God knows we aren’t smart.
From the forties through the early nineties, letters to the editor would occasionally appear in the back of the magazine, usually identified as Departments of Amplification. Those who wrote letters to the magazine during this period include Eudora Welty, John McNulty, George S. Kaufman, and Thomas Mann. The following is excerpted from a letter written by Eudora Welty and published as a Department of Amplification in the January 1, 1949, issue. Welty is responding to Edmund Wilson’s review of William Faulkner’s Intruder in the Dust (1948):
How well Illinois or South Dakota or Vermont has fared in The New Yorker book-review column lately, I haven’t noticed, but Mississippi was pushed under three times in two weeks…. Such critical irrelevance, favorable or unfavorable, the South has long been used to, but now Mr. Wilson fancies it up and it will resound a bit louder. Mr. Faulkner all the while continues to be capable of passion, of love, of wisdom, perhaps of prophecy, toward his material. Isn’t that enough? Such qualities can identify themselves anywhere in the world and in any century without furnishing an address or references…. Mr. Wilson has to account for the superior work of Mr. Faulkner, of course he has to, and to show why the novelist writes his transcendent descriptions, he offers the explanation that the Southern man-made world is different looking, hence its impact is different, and those adjectives come out. (Different looking–to whom?) Could the simple, though superfluous, explanation not be that the recipient of the impact, Mr. Faulkner, is the different component here, possessing the brain as he does, and that the superiority of the work done lies in that brain?
In October of 1992, with Tina Brown’s first issue, the magazine began occasionally publishing single letters under the heading “Mailbox.” The first stand-alone Letters to the Editor column, titled “In the Mail,” ran in the October 4, 1993, issue. The weekly column was renamed “The Mail” in the January 20, 1997, issue. Today, the magazine receives about one hundred letters to the editor per issue, and every letter is read by someone on the editorial staff. Usually, the letters editor selects three or four for the weekly column. The criteria for choosing a letter vary, but typically the editor is looking for something that furthers or clarifies a point in the piece or is an interesting addendum. Some of the people who have written letters to the magazine in the past fifteen years include Norman Mailer, Erica Jong, Colin Powell, Stephen Sondheim, Gore Vidal, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., and Dick Cavett.
Q. Did The New Yorker always publish a pre-holiday “On and Off the Avenue”?
Jon writes: Each year, for most of its history, The New Yorker has published holiday shopping guides under the “On and Off the Avenue” rubric. Until the early nineties, these gift guides appeared annually over several issues in November and December, broken up into such categories as gifts for children, gifts for the house, holiday food, and wrappings and trimmings. During the Second World War, the magazine ran, earlier in the year, a guide to gifts for men and women in the armed forces. The pre-Christmas gift guides were written by the regular Avenue correspondents: Lois Long, Sheila Hibben, Marion Miller, Barbara Blake, Cecil Webb, and Kennedy Fraser. In the nineteen-eighties, Lynn Yaeger, Cynthia Zarin, Andy Logan, and Mary D. Kierstead contributed. Since the mid-nineties, the column has run occasionally; Patricia Marx has published gift guides the last two Decembers.
The style of these columns has been consistently direct and pragmatic. “Paging Mr. Claus,” a pre-Christmas guide from the December 7, 1929, issue, warns readers, “Please don’t phone us for information, and if it’s peace you want, shop early in the morning.” The column sums up Hammacher Schlemmer like this: “Labor-saving devices a specialty. Innumerable electrical tricks; all kinds of hardware; anything for kitchens.” When it comes to buying beauty products for wives, the column writer suggests, “If you know her preferences, you need read no further.”
The writer of a 1944 column on gifts for servicemen and -women notes: “Women on tropical stations must have cotton lingerie, such as Lord & Taylor slips ($3.95)…. For girls in cold climates, Macy has two-piece pajama suits, knit like balbriggan and cut like ski pants; $3…. Navy nurses, poor things, must wear black cotton or rayon stockings. Saks has them.” The writer goes on to suggest gifts for soldiers in hospitals. “Sleight-of-hand paraphernalia delights both men who are bedridden and those able to get around. You can easily assemble a bag of tricks yourself.” Six months later, Lieutenant Alton Kastner wrote a letter to the magazine from the South Pacific critiquing some of the suggestions: “Fruitcake is ‘surefire,’ you say. One mammoth fruitcake we got was sadly massacred by our industrious little insect friends…. Only ten per cent of the hundreds of fruitcakes arrived in edible condition.”
In later decades, the columns were less list-like and more discursive. Andy Logan’s “Under the Children’s Christmas Tree,” from December 9, 1985, considers the new fad of including documentation such as “birth” certificates with dolls, ascribing the trend to the pervasive influence of Cabbage Patch Kids. Later, commenting on a “Peanuts” anthology, she quotes Umberto Eco, who said of Charlie Brown and friends, “They are the monstrous, infantile reductions of all the neuroses of a modern citizen of the industrial civilization.”
In her recent columns, Patricia Marx has brought back something of the lighter touch of the gift guides’ earliest years. In her 2005 guide to holiday gifts for women, Marx puts forward the following theory:
Everything costs so much these days that everything starts to seem cheap. Speaking as a pretend economist, I must explain that this is because the rate of real inflation cannot keep up with the rate of inflation in one’s head. And so when a person hears of a brownstone going for twelve million, even a person who happens to gulp at the monthly mortgage on her puny one-bedroom, she finds herself thinking, What a bargain! Maybe I should buy that!
Q. Who have all the cartoon editors been over the years? Are they all cartoonists themselves? Is the cartoon editor the same as the cover editor and the art editor?
Erin writes: The New Yorker‘s first art editor was Rea Irvin, the illustrator and cartoonist who created Eustace Tilley–the monocled dandy who appears on the magazine’s cover each February–and was the driving force behind the magazine’s graphic identity and early artistic innovations. Irvin, along with a few other staffers, met with editor Harold Ross every Tuesday afternoon, from 1925 to 1951, to peruse the weekly submissions of covers, cartoons, illustrations, and so on. In 1939, James (Jim) Geraghty, a cartoon-gag writer at the magazine, was hired as art editor, and Irvin was from that point on known as the art director. Irvin continued to sit in on art meetings throughout the forties, but he left the magazine after Ross’s death in 1951. From the fifties until his retirement in 1972, Geraghty oversaw all art in The New Yorker and acted as the liaison between the cartoonists and the magazine. Some of the artists he nurtured during that period include Peter De Vries, Charles Addams, Saul Steinberg, George Booth, William Steig, Ed Koren, and Charles Barsotti.
In 1972, William Shawn hired the cartoonist Lee Lorenz, who had worked for Geraghty since 1958, as art editor, and Lorenz retained that position until 1993, when he became cartoon editor. During his tenure, which ended with his retirement in 1998, Lorenz cultivated such artists as Jack Ziegler, Roz Chast, Jean-Jacques Sempé, Bruce Eric Kaplan, and Michael Crawford. Bob Mankoff, Lorenz’s successor as cartoon editor, has been a cartoonist at the magazine since 1977. Mankoff also runs The Cartoon Bank, the leading searchable database of cartoon humor on the web. In his nine years as cartoon editor, Mankoff has fostered cartoonists like William Haefeli, Carolita Johnson, Drew Dernavich, Alex Gregory, Matthew Diffee, and David Sipress.
Caroline Mailhot, the current art director, joined the magazine in 1992, and, with the design consultant Wynn Dan, adapted the magazine’s design to incorporate photography and a wider use of illustration. She continues to be responsible for the overall design of the magazine and of each issue. Françoise Mouly assumed responsibility for covers when she was named art editor in 1993. Elisabeth Biondi, the visuals editor, oversees photography, and Christine Curry, the illustration editor, oversees the assignment of illustrations.
Q. Is The New Yorker available on audio?
Jon writes: There are several ways to access content from The New Yorker on audio. A weekly audio edition, with a selection of pieces from the week’s issue of the magazine, is available online from Audible.com. Listeners may buy individual issues or an annual subscription. A typical week’s content might include the Comment, two Talk stories, a Shouts & Murmurs, two feature stories, and a movie review. Audible also offers packages of recordings from The New Yorker Festival.
Under the “Online Only” tab on The New Yorker‘s web site, browsers will find a list of recent Q. & A.s with New Yorker writers as well as Audio Slide Shows and the Fiction podcast, a monthly feature in which a current New Yorker fiction writer selects and discusses a story from the magazine’s archive.
Podcasts of The New Yorker‘s audio content are also available for free through the Apple iTunes store and other podcast sites (and via RSS readers). In addition to the monthly Fiction podcast mentioned above, the magazine produces two weekly podcasts. The New Yorker Out Loud features the Q. & A.s and other audio content from the web site. The Comment Podcast contains a reading of the week’s commentary column from the magazine (produced by Audible). Readers can also subscribe to these podcasts via The New Yorker‘s RSS page.
Associated Services for the Blind produces recordings of articles from newspapers and magazines, including The New Yorker. A recent visit to the ASB web site revealed that The New Yorker was among the top ten best-selling items in their Braille and Audio Resource Center. Like Audible, the ASB records selections from the magazine, rather than the contents of an entire issue.
Perhaps best of all, each year you can hear New Yorker writers read their work in person at The New Yorker Festival, whose 2007 program can be found here.
Q. I know that Lois Long created Tables for Two. When was that, and what were some of the restaurants she reviewed? Who started writing it after her, and when did the tradition start of different staffers (or freelance writers) doing weekly reviews?
Erin writes: The magazine’s Tables for Two department was originally called When Nights Are Bold, and it included reviews of nightclubs and speakeasies as well as restaurants. Charles Baskerville wrote the column, under the pseudonym Tophat, until July 18, 1925, when Lois Long took over, writing under the pen name Lipstick. The column was renamed Tables for Two in the September 12, 1925, issue. Long, a former Vanity Fair reporter, brought a lively and effervescent tone to the column, which typically ran to two or three pages. That tone is reflected in this excerpt from a review she wrote about Harlem’s Cotton Club in the May 4, 1929, issue:
Another thing that your most high-hat friends have recently discovered in a body is the Cotton Club in Harlem, which has a perfectly elegant revue that goes on at twelve-thirty and again around two o’clock. I fondly think that this revue…is the reason for their presence there–I cannot believe that most of them realize that they are listening to probably the greatest jazz orchestra of all time, which is Duke Ellington’s–I’ll fight anyone who says different. It is barbaric and rhythmic and brassy as jazz ought to be; it is mellow as music ought to be. There are throbbing moans and wah-wahs and outbreaks on the part of the brasses, and it is all too much for an impressionable girl.
In addition to the Cotton Club, Long reviewed most of the upscale hot spots of the Jazz Age, including the Stork Club, the Four Seasons, Tavern on the Green, the Rainbow Room, and the Algonquin. Her last Tables for Two review ran in the May 28, 1938, issue. After that, the column was written by other New Yorker staffers, including David Lardner and the prolific R. E. M. Whitaker, until February of 1963.
The magazine also published a separate Restaurants column, written by Sheila Hibben and Katherine Blow, which began in 1935. That department reviewed restaurants as varied as Grand Central’s Oyster Bar, “21,” Pete’s Tavern, and the Russian Tea Room. The Restaurants column ran for just seven years, but Tables for Two reemerged, as an occasional department, in the Goings On About Town section, beginning in May of 1995. It expanded to a weekly department, still in GOAT, in the spring of 2000. Today, the column is written by a rotating group of five or six staffers.
Q. What is the origin of the vertical band of solid color that appears on the left side of every cover of The New Yorker?
Jon writes: That vertical band is known as the cover strap. The strap was included in Rea Irvin’s design for the first cover in 1925, and it has appeared on every New Yorker cover since. Usually the strap is rendered as a solid column of color, but over the years a number of artists have used it as a way of ornamenting or enhancing their illustrations. Some notable uses of the strap include the August 6, 1927 cover by Ilonka Karasz depicting a concert at the Central Park bandshell. The strap contains passages from a musical score.
More recently, for his January 8, 2007 cover “On Thin Ice,” Ivan Brunetti accentuated his drawing of a young girl skating on a shrinking ice floe with smaller visions of global warming in the strap, including a polar bear sipping a drink in front of a fan and an igloo with a melted roof.
Addressed elsewhere in Ask the Librarians: VII: Who were the fiction editors?, Shouts & Murmurs history, Sloan Wilson, international beats; VI: Letters to the editor, On and Off the Avenue, is the cartoon editor the same as the cover editor and the art editor?, audio versions of the magazine, Lois Long and Tables for Two, the cover strap; V: E. B. White’s newsbreaks, Garrison Keillor and the Grand Ole Opry, Harold Ross remembrances, whimsical pseudonyms, the classic boardroom cartoon; IV: Terrence Malick, Pierre Le-Tan, TV criticism, the magazine’s indexes, tiny drawings, Fantasticks follies; III: Early editors, short-story rankings, Audax Minor, Talk’s political stance; II: Robert Day cartoons, where New Yorker readers are, obscure departments, The Complete New Yorker, the birth of the TOC, the Second World War “pony edition”; I: A. J. Liebling, Spots, office typewriters, Trillin on food, the magazine’s first movie review, cartoon fact checking.
Festival! Schedule! Here!
Note: If you’re looking for the 2008 schedule, you’re going to want to look here.
We’ve got it right here, right now. If you’re susceptible to hyperventilation, have a paper bag handy (low-tech, but it works), and also keep in mind that 10 percent of the tickets will be held back for purchase at Festival HQ. Now, feast your eyes on this! Everything below will be going out on Festival Wire later today, and you should sign up if you haven’t already, because otherwise you might miss out on something good. Like the surprise extra Judd Apatow event, for which you can warm up by visiting our Knocked Up round table and, I hope, expressing your superbad and supergood opinions.
By the way, if you like events that we like, and we think you do, you should sign up for the Emdashes Google Calendar. It’s got lots of stuff like this on it. Click to join.
Look for our full 2007 program schedule in the September 17th issue of The New Yorker, on newsstands September 10th. The Festival schedule will also be posted on the same date on festival.newyorker.com.
Tickets to all events may be purchased beginning on Saturday, September 15th, at 12 noon E.T. All programming is subject to change. Tickets available online at ticketmaster.com, at all outlets in the New York metropolitan area, or by calling 1-877-391-0545. Tickets will also be sold during the weekend at Festival Headquarters, located at 125 West 18th Street, and at event doors. All Ticketmaster orders are subject to service charges.
Come join us!
FRIDAY
OCTOBER 5
An evening of paired readings by writers whose stories have appeared in The New Yorker and conversations between writers on the themes that feature in their work; a New Yorker Town Hall Meeting on Iraq; an Errol Morris film project; and the second New Yorker Dance Party.
FICTION NIGHT: READINGS
Daniel Alarcón and Zadie Smith
7 P.M. Angel Orensanz Foundation ($16)
Junot DÃaz and Annie Proulx
7 P.M. Cedar Lake Dance Studios ($16)
Jhumpa Lahiri and Edward P. Jones
7 P.M. Ailey Citigroup Theatre, Joan Weill Center for Dance ($16)
Karen Russell and Jonathan Lethem
7 P.M. Anthology Film Archives ($16)
Marisa Silver and Paul Theroux
7 P.M. Acura Stage at Helen Mills Theatre ($16)
Ann Beattie and Jonathan Franzen
9:30 P.M. Cedar Lake Dance Studios ($16)
FICTION NIGHT: CONVERSATIONS BETWEEN WRITERS
Salman Rushdie and Orhan Pamuk on Homeland
7 P.M. Highline Ballroom ($25)
Norman Mailer and Martin Amis on Monsters
9:30 P.M. Highline Ballroom ($25)
Lorrie Moore and Jeffrey Eugenides on Conformity
9:30 P.M. Ailey Citigroup Theatre, Joan Weill Center for Dance ($25)
George Saunders and Jonathan Safran Foer on The Incredible
9:30 P.M. Angel Orensanz Foundation ($25)
Miranda July and A. M. Homes on Deviants
9:30 P.M. Anthology Film Archives ($25)
Donald Antrim and Colm TóibÃn on Mothers
9:30 P.M. Acura Stage at Helen Mills Theatre ($25)
THE NEW YORKER TOWN HALL MEETING: IRAQ REVISITED
With Ali Abdul-Amir Allawi, Jon Lee Anderson, David Kilcullen, and Phebe Marr. George Packer, moderator.
7 P.M. Town Hall ($16)
FRIDAY NIGHT FILM PROJECT
A conversation between Errol Morris and Philip Gourevitch about Abu Ghraib, with clips from “Standard Operating Procedure.”
8 P.M. Directors Guild of America ($25)
A NEW YORKER DANCE PARTY
Hosted by Sasha Frere-Jones, with special guest d.j. Diplo.
10 P.M. Hiro Ballroom and Lounge ($20)
SATURDAY
OCTOBER 6
A day of interviews, panel discussions, and talks by New Yorker writers; Early Shift and Late Shift events, many of them featuring live musical performance, throughout the city; the inaugural New Yorker Debate; a sneak preview of the upcoming feature film “The Kite Runner?; a Saturday Night Special with David Byrne on urban bicycling; and humor events and free book signings at Festival Headquarters.
CASUALS
Wake-Up Call with Andy Borowitz
10 A.M. The New Yorker Cabaret at Festival Headquarters ($12)
WRITERS AND THEIR SUBJECTS
Neil LaBute and John Lahr
10 A.M. Acura Stage at Helen Mills Theatre ($25)
Matthew Bourne and Joan Acocella
1 P.M. Cedar Lake Dance Studios ($25)
Anthony Lane and Simon Schama
1 P.M. Acura Stage at Helen Mills Theatre ($25)
Peter Sellars and Alex Ross
4 P.M. Acura Stage at Helen Mills Theatre ($25)
IN CONVERSATION WITH
Seymour M. Hersh interviewed by David Remnick
1 P.M. Directors Guild of America ($25)
Steve Martin interviewed by Susan Morrison
4 P.M. Directors Guild of America ($25)
NEW YORKER TALKS
Sasha Frere-Jones: What Isn’t Hip-Hop?
2 P.M. Ailey Citigroup Theatre, Joan Weill Center for Dance ($25)
Samantha Power: Darfur~Activism Without Action
4:30 P.M. Ailey Citigroup Theatre, Joan Weill Center for Dance ($25)
PANELS
Outside the Box
With Jenji Kohan, David Milch, Ronald D. Moore, David Shore, and David Simon. Tad Friend, moderator.
10 A.M. Florence Gould Hall, French Institute Alliance Française ($25)
Investigative Journalism
With Jane Mayer, James B. Stewart, and Lawrence Wright. Dorothy Wickenden, moderator.
10 A.M. Highline Ballroom ($25)
Casualties of War
With Major L. Tammy Duckworth, Captain (Ret.) Dawn Halfaker, and Colonel John B. Holcomb. Atul Gawande, moderator.
1 P.M. Florence Gould Hall, French Institute Alliance Française ($25)
Superheroes
With Tim Kring, Jonathan Lethem, Mike Mignola, and Grant Morrison. Ben Greenman, moderator.
1 P.M. Highline Ballroom ($25)
Costume Design
With Colleen Atwood, Patrizia von Brandenstein, Patricia Field, and William Ivey Long. Judith Thurman, moderator.
4 P.M. Cedar Lake Dance Studios ($25)
BOOK SIGNINGS
(Please note the schedule of book signings at the bottom of this e-mail.)
Noon to 5 P.M. Festival Headquarters (free)
EARLY SHIFT
Fiona Apple talks with Sasha Frere-Jones:
A Conversation with Music
7:30 P.M. Brooklyn Lyceum ($35)
Anna Deavere Smith talks with John Lahr:
A Conversation with Performance
7:30 P.M. Cedar Lake Dance Studios ($35)
An Evening with Sigur Rós
7:30 P.M. Florence Gould Hall, French Institute Alliance Française ($35)
Eugene Levy talks with Susan Orlean
7:30 P.M. Acura Stage at Helen Mills Theatre ($35)
Rosanne Cash talks with Hendrik Hertzberg:
A Conversation with Music
7:30 P.M. Highline Ballroom ($35)
Saturday Night Sneak Preview: “The Kite Runner”
Khaled Hosseini and Marc Forster talk with Jon Lee Anderson.
7:30 P.M. Directors Guild of America ($25)
SATURDAY NIGHT SPECIAL
David Byrne Presents: How New Yorkers Ride Bikes
David Byrne will host an evening of music, discussion, film, readings, and surprises dedicated to the advancement of bicycling in New York City, including talks and performances by the Classic Riders Bicycle Club, Jan Gehl, Calvin Trillin, Paul Steely White, Jonathan Wood, and the Young@Heart Chorus.
7:30 P.M. Town Hall ($16)
THE NEW YORKER DEBATE
Resolved: The Ivy League Should Be Abolished
With Malcolm Gladwell and Adam Gopnik. Chaired by Simon Schama.
8 P.M. New York Society for Ethical Culture ($20)
CASUALS
New Yorker Parlor Games with Henry Alford
8 P.M. The New Yorker Cabaret at Festival Headquarters ($25)
LATE SHIFT
Yo La Tengo talk with Ben Greenman:
A Conversation with Music
10 P.M. Brooklyn Lyceum ($35)
John C. Reilly talks with Dana Goodyear
10 P.M. Cedar Lake Dance Studios ($35)
Bill Nighy talks with Michael Specter
10 P.M. Acura Stage at Helen Mills Theatre ($35)
Dick Dale, Billy Gibbons, Vernon Reid, and Omar Rodriguez-Lopez talk with Nick Paumgarten:
A Conversation with Music
10 P.M. Highline Ballroom ($35)
SUNDAY
OCTOBER 7
A day of About Town excursions and events throughout the city, including a free demonstration of the new sport parkour; talks by New Yorker writers; a series of Master Classes in poetry, profile writing, and photography; and a humor event and free book signings at Festival Headquarters.
CASUALS
Bagels with Bob
With The New Yorker’s cartoon editor, Robert Mankoff.
10 A.M. The New Yorker Cabaret at Festival Headquarters ($12)
ABOUT TOWN
Behind the Scenes at the Museum: Mike Novacek talks with Burkhard Bilger
Burkhard Bilger and Mike Novacek will lead a backstage tour of the American Museum of Natural History, followed by brunch in the lab.
11 A.M. American Museum of Natural History ($60)
Come Hungry
Calvin Trillin leads his seventh annual walking tour of Chinatown and Little Italy, sampling his favorite eateries and culminating in a dim-sum feast.
11 A.M. Ticket buyers will be contacted as to the starting point. ($100)
Inside the Artist’s Studio: Jeff Koons talks with Calvin Tomkins and Dodie Kazanjian
Calvin Tomkins and Dodie Kazanjian will accompany Jeff Koons on a guided tour of his studio, concluding with brunch with the artist.
11 A.M. Ticket buyers will be contacted about the location. ($80)
The Next Century’s Newsroom: A tour of Bloomberg L.P. headquarters
Paul Goldberger will lead a visit to Bloomberg L.P.’s state-of-the-art newsroom, followed by brunch in the building.
12 noon. Bloomberg Tower ($60)
Parkour New York: David Belle talks with Alec Wilkinson
David Belle will discuss, and demonstrate, parkour, the sport he created. Parkour is a system of leaps, vaults, rolls, and landings designed to help a person surmount any obstacles in his path.
1 P.M. Event location to be announced. This event is free and open to the public.
WRITERS AND THEIR SUBJECTS
Rachel Brand, Neal Katyal, and Jeffrey Toobin
1 P.M. Florence Gould Hall, French Institute Alliance Française ($25)
Judd Apatow, Seth Rogen, and David Denby
4 P.M. Directors Guild of America ($25)
NEW YORKER TALKS
Jerome Groopman: What Is Missing in Medicine?
10 A.M. Ailey Citigroup Theatre, Joan Weill Center for Dance ($25)
Oliver Sacks: Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain
1 P.M. Ailey Citigroup Theatre, Joan Weill Center for Dance ($25)
Alex Ross: The Rest Is Noise: A Multimedia Tour of Twentieth-century Music
4 P.M. Ailey Citigroup Theatre, Joan Weill Center for Dance ($25)
MASTER CLASSES
Seminars for people with advanced interest in the topic.
Poetry: Robert Hass and Katha Pollitt [link mine]
10 A.M. Acura Stage at Helen Mills Theatre ($35)
Profile Writing: Susan Orlean and Mark Singer
1 P.M. Acura Stage at Helen Mills Theatre ($35)
Photography: Mary Ellen Mark and Martin Schoeller
4 P.M. Acura Stage at Helen Mills Theatre ($35)
BOOK SIGNINGS
(Please note the schedule of book signings at the bottom of this e-mail.)
Noon to 5 P.M. Festival Headquarters (free)
FESTIVAL HEADQUARTERS
Is your favorite event sold out? Head to Festival Headquarters, located at 125 West 18th Street (between Sixth and Seventh Avenues). There you can:
*Purchase last-minute tickets. Tickets to ALL events will be sold at Festival Headquarters, beginning on Friday and continuing throughout the weekend.
*Purchase limited-edition merchandise, including Festival T-shirts and posters as well as books and DVDs by New Yorker writers and artists and Festival participants.
*Attend book signings and other Festival events, as listed.
*Get additional information on Festival programs.
Festival Headquarters will be open on Friday, October 5th, from 3 P.M. to 6 P.M., on Saturday, October 6th, from 9:30 A.M. to 6 P.M., and on Sunday, October 7th, from 9:30 A.M. to 5 P.M.
Tickets will also be sold at the doors to each event one hour before start time, with the exception of Behind the Scenes at the Museum, Come Hungry, Inside the Artist’s Studio, and the tour of Bloomberg L.P. headquarters. Cash only.
BOOK SIGNINGS
Saturday, October 6
12 P.M.
Junot DÃaz ~ “The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao”
A. M. Homes ~ “The Mistress’s Daughter”
1 P.M.
Annie Proulx ~ “Bad Dirt: Wyoming Stories 2”
Paul Theroux ~ “The Elephanta Suite”
2 P.M.
Miranda July ~ “No One Belongs Here More Than You”
George Saunders ~ “The Braindead Megaphone”
3 P.M.
Salman Rushdie ~ “The Ground Beneath Her Feet”
4 P.M.
Atul Gawande ~ “Better: A Surgeon’s Notes on Performance”
5 P.M.
Orhan Pamuk ~ “Other Colors: Essays and a Story”
Sunday, October 7
12 P.M.
Robert Hass ~ “Time and Materials”
Katha Pollitt [link mine] ~ “Learning to Drive: And Other Life Stories”
1 P.M.
Joan Acocella ~ “Twenty-eight Artists and Two Saints”
Alex Ross ~ “The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century”
2 P.M.
Jeffrey Eugenides ~ “Middlesex”
Jonathan Lethem ~ “You Don’t Love Me Yet” and “Omega the Unknown”
3 P.M.
Neil LaBute ~ “Wrecks: And Other Plays”
Judith Thurman ~ “Cleopatra’s Nose: 39 Varieties of Desire”
4 P.M.
Jeffrey Toobin ~ “The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court”
Calvin Trillin ~ “About Alice”
Tickets to all Festival events may be purchased beginning on Saturday, September 15th, at 12 noon E.T. All programming is subject to change. Tickets available online at ticketmaster.com at all outlets in the New York metropolitan area, or by calling 1-877-391-0545. Tickets will also be sold during the weekend at Festival Headquarters, located at 125 West 18th Street, and at event doors. All Ticketmaster orders are subject to service charges.
The 2007 program schedule will appear in the September 17th issue of The New Yorker, on newsstands September 10th. The Festival schedule will also be posted on the same date on festival.newyorker.com.
The Questions People Ask
What’s James Wood going to be like as a New Yorker critic?
Are film bloggers Stepford Critics?
How is New Orleans doing, and does medication help?
Is L.A. really a shallow wasteland, or does it just look that way?
Whose “deadpan sensibility and plump line drawings” does Liesl Schillinger praise in the Times?
What does newyorkette think of the latest issue?
Is the board game based on the Cartoon Caption Contest any fun to play?
Love is the answer—I wonder what the question is? (Printed on the yellow plastic Ziggy comb I found on the soccer field in elementary school)
If you have answers, please send them to letters@emdashes.com.
The Effect of Tacos on Man-in-the-Moon Magazines
Kevin Drum poses a question of vital importance. To start with, he quotes the following passage from Herman Wouk’s 1950s novel Youngblood Hawke:
Soon the lawyer sat in the living room in his shirtsleeves at Jeanne’s insistence, his tie off, eating tacos from a tray. He needed a shave, and his hair was unkempt. Hawke noticed that the bristles on his face were reddish rather than blond. He looked more tired than Hawke had ever seen him, but the food and the beer brought him to quickly. “Why, these things are marvellous! What do you call them, Jeanne, tacos? I’ve never eaten anything like this. Delicious! Is there a restaurant in town where I can order these?”
She said, pleased, “Well, if you can find a lowbrow enough Mexican joint they’ll probably have tacos, but I wouldn’t endorse the contents, Gus. Better ask me, when you feel like having them again. They’re easy to make.”
Kevin, a Californian to the core, then asks: “Really? In New York City, circa 1952, tacos were so uncommon as to be practically unknown? Who knew?”
I’m far too young to have any real insights into this question, but I immediately thought of the Complete New Yorker. The results turned out to be pretty interesting. According to the CNY, the earliest mention of the word “taco” was in 1974. There are actually two hits from 1974. In the later of the two, a cartoon by Barney Tobey (July 15, 1974), the gag turns on the “exotic” nature of the taco, although the context implies that the term was at least somewhat known to New Yorker readers.
More interesting is the first hit, two months earlier (May 13, 1974). It’s a TOTT by Anthony Hiss about something called the “Taco Trolley.” The first paragraph supplies the telltale tone:
The taco is a tasty, crispy tortilla filled with beef, lettuce, shredded cheese, and special sauce. It is a wildly popular fast-food item in California and places like that. In fact, the taco is one of the reasons people visit California.
Ha! I love it—”places like that.” Difficult to see anyone getting away with that today. And that dryly dismissive third sentence seems a precursor to Woody Allen’s joke from Annie Hall that “the only cultural advantage” that Los Angeles can claim is that “you can make a right turn on a red light.”
I think it’s safe to assume that, July cartoon or no July cartoon, the New Yorker editors thought it wiser to explain exactly what a taco is and where it comes from. So it wasn’t exactly everyday lingo.
(The comment thread to Kevin’s post is fascinating, constituting a kind of thumbnail cultural history of the taco in the United States. It’s truly the blogosphere at its finest. My findings here merely confirm the observations of many of the commenters there.)
—Martin Schneider