1 00:00:01,060 --> 00:00:19,140 I. Good afternoon, everyone, I'm Tara Steps, the academic programme director here at the rally, 2 00:00:19,140 --> 00:00:23,130 and I'm delighted to welcome you all to the highlight of our literary calendar. 3 00:00:23,130 --> 00:00:30,270 The Essence Hollingsworth lecture in American Arts and Letters. This event would not be possible without the continued generosity investment 4 00:00:30,270 --> 00:00:34,830 homes with whom I'm very pleased to say has been able to join us this afternoon. 5 00:00:34,830 --> 00:00:39,030 Today's lecture will be given by Deborah Eastman, fiction editor at The New Yorker, 6 00:00:39,030 --> 00:00:46,530 and therefore holder of one of the most influential and arguably fascinating positions in American literary culture. 7 00:00:46,530 --> 00:00:52,260 Having joined The New Yorker in 1997, she was appointed to the role in 2003, 8 00:00:52,260 --> 00:00:57,630 the first woman to hold the position since the magazine was founded in 1925. 9 00:00:57,630 --> 00:01:02,580 The second sorry, I read that online and I was going to double check the second. 10 00:01:02,580 --> 00:01:06,330 Sorry. Well, I'm going to correct that when I see it. Fact check. 11 00:01:06,330 --> 00:01:11,640 Sorry. Thank you. We are extremely lucky to have her, not least because until just last week, 12 00:01:11,640 --> 00:01:17,100 she was busy putting together the annual two volume fiction issue of the magazine. 13 00:01:17,100 --> 00:01:21,930 In addition, in addition to hosting the award winning New Yorker fiction podcast, 14 00:01:21,930 --> 00:01:31,920 Deborah Triesman has also edited the anthology 20 Under 40 Stories from The New Yorker from 2010 and most recently with Andorran Walter Hopps, 15 00:01:31,920 --> 00:01:42,960 The Dream Colony A Life in Art from 2017. She is additionally a recipient of the Maxwell Perkins Award for Distinguished Contribution to Fiction. 16 00:01:42,960 --> 00:01:49,050 The lecture, entitled New Yorker Fiction through the Decades, will be followed by a Q&A chaired by Merv M. Ray, 17 00:01:49,050 --> 00:01:57,240 associate professor of English Literature here at Worcester College, who has a particular interest herself in American fiction after 1945. 18 00:01:57,240 --> 00:02:11,650 So we're in for quite a treat this afternoon. Please welcome Deborah Tracy. 19 00:02:11,650 --> 00:02:16,120 Thank you, Terry, and thank you. Oh, I don't need to speak into this story. Am I good with the Mike? 20 00:02:16,120 --> 00:02:19,810 OK. I have one. Yes. OK. 21 00:02:19,810 --> 00:02:26,770 I need both. OK. Double double double issue. 22 00:02:26,770 --> 00:02:36,340 Thank you for inviting me. It's a it's a pleasure to be here. And in some ways or in every way, Oxford is my hometown where I was born, 23 00:02:36,340 --> 00:02:46,300 and it's nice to have my father here and my daughter here in the back preparing to sneak out once I get boring. 24 00:02:46,300 --> 00:02:54,250 So the first thing that you find yourself thinking about when you start working in the fiction department at The New Yorker, 25 00:02:54,250 --> 00:02:58,780 as I did in late Nineteen ninety seven, is the question of the New Yorker story. 26 00:02:58,780 --> 00:03:01,570 This prototypical story in the magazine, 27 00:03:01,570 --> 00:03:10,930 which is it's a common thing to hear in the U.S. that the people will dismiss things by saying, Oh, that's a New Yorker story, 28 00:03:10,930 --> 00:03:14,800 or that's just, you know, so there's an idea of what it is, 29 00:03:14,800 --> 00:03:20,920 but most people don't actually know what that idea is, and everyone seems to have a different idea. 30 00:03:20,920 --> 00:03:27,970 You know, whether it's traditional or it's domestic fiction or it's women's fiction, it's all about bad marriages. 31 00:03:27,970 --> 00:03:33,790 It's bad boy fiction. It's senior citizens fiction. It's self-consciously multicultural fiction. 32 00:03:33,790 --> 00:03:38,410 It's yeah, some some people say that Dorothy Parker defined it. 33 00:03:38,410 --> 00:03:40,600 It's very urbane and New York City based. 34 00:03:40,600 --> 00:03:48,850 Others credit John Cheever, and it's all about the suburbs and the trials and betrayals of middle class family life. 35 00:03:48,850 --> 00:03:56,470 As one reader wrote in Nineteen thirty three, it's whimsy is concerning frustrated little milquetoast. 36 00:03:56,470 --> 00:04:05,110 Or, as James Thurber complained to Katharine White, the magazine's first fiction editor in 1938. 37 00:04:05,110 --> 00:04:11,470 We've had an awful lot of the sad, drifting little men muddling gently through the most trivial and in palpable of situations, 38 00:04:11,470 --> 00:04:18,490 ending up on a faint and to me, usually evasive note of resignation to it all, whatever it all is. 39 00:04:18,490 --> 00:04:23,020 Or, as Lionel Trilling noted, writing in the nation in nineteen forty two, 40 00:04:23,020 --> 00:04:28,870 the New Yorker publishes a kind of short story, the main characteristic of which is its moral intensity. 41 00:04:28,870 --> 00:04:36,010 Every week at the barber's or the dentist's or on the commuting train, a representative part of the middle class learns about the horrors of snobbery, 42 00:04:36,010 --> 00:04:39,550 ignorance and insensitivity, and about the sufferings of children, servants, 43 00:04:39,550 --> 00:04:46,780 the super and superannuated and the subordinate in the 1950s, according to Jonathan Franzen. 44 00:04:46,780 --> 00:04:53,890 What made a story New Yorker was its carefully wrought many comedy prose, its long passages of physical description, 45 00:04:53,890 --> 00:05:00,790 the precision and the sobriety of which created a kind of negative emotional space, a suggestion of feeling without the naming of it. 46 00:05:00,790 --> 00:05:07,630 And above all, its signature style of ending, which was either elegantly oblique or frustratingly coy, depending on your taste. 47 00:05:07,630 --> 00:05:09,250 Outside the offices of the New Yorker, 48 00:05:09,250 --> 00:05:17,080 its fiction editors were rumoured to routinely delete the final paragraph of any story accepted for publication. 49 00:05:17,080 --> 00:05:18,700 By the time I got to the magazine, 50 00:05:18,700 --> 00:05:29,980 the stereotype I kept hearing was that it was all stories about white men fighting their way through midlife crisis with booze, adultery and hunting. 51 00:05:29,980 --> 00:05:37,750 I particularly enjoy one description of the New Yorker story that appeared in The New York Times in a review of a John Cheever story collection, 52 00:05:37,750 --> 00:05:40,900 said There are 30 30 sketches in this volume. 53 00:05:40,900 --> 00:05:46,790 All of them are worth at least five minutes of your time, even though the majority are exercises and marital disruption. 54 00:05:46,790 --> 00:05:50,980 Hagrid dips a mania, poverty or plain and fancy jitters. 55 00:05:50,980 --> 00:06:01,900 Most of them appeared between the covers of The New Yorker. Perhaps this accounts for their peculiar fse and detachment and facile despair. 56 00:06:01,900 --> 00:06:06,910 The magazine introduced serious fiction in 1928, which was when it was three years old. 57 00:06:06,910 --> 00:06:13,720 Since then, it's published more than thirteen thousand stories. It's probably rejected two million or more. 58 00:06:13,720 --> 00:06:18,670 And over the years, the standards and conventions of storytelling and story writing have shifted many times, 59 00:06:18,670 --> 00:06:22,870 and so has the editorial perception of what the magazine should publish. 60 00:06:22,870 --> 00:06:30,520 In the 1930s, plot was frowned upon, as was indirection, failure to divulge location, 61 00:06:30,520 --> 00:06:35,740 time period and other salient locating data in the first paragraph. 62 00:06:35,740 --> 00:06:43,870 As late as the 1980s, even a little bit into the nineties, vulgarity and sexual imagery were considered problematic. 63 00:06:43,870 --> 00:06:54,100 When Alice Munro wanted to publish a story in 1984 in which a woman's pubic hair was described as the rat between Diana's legs, 64 00:06:54,100 --> 00:07:05,320 she was prevailed upon to rewrite the phrase as the dark, silky pelt of some unlucky rodent. 65 00:07:05,320 --> 00:07:11,010 She reverted to her original in the book and in an introduction to an end. 66 00:07:11,010 --> 00:07:17,940 Anthology of stories from the magazine that came out in 1940, the editor notes that in making the selections for the book, 67 00:07:17,940 --> 00:07:26,700 they ruled out all reminiscences, parables, prophecies, fables, fantasies, satire as burlesque parodies and nonsense tales. 68 00:07:26,700 --> 00:07:32,190 These days we publish all of those things, and if I've had any mission as fiction editor, 69 00:07:32,190 --> 00:07:41,370 it's simply just to make it harder and harder for people to believe that there is a category that includes everything and everyone we want to publish. 70 00:07:41,370 --> 00:07:45,090 You know, a magazine that can alternate between George Saunders and William Trevor. 71 00:07:45,090 --> 00:07:49,140 Alice Munro, Zadie Smith, Jhumpa Lahiri, Haruki Murakami. 72 00:07:49,140 --> 00:07:56,970 There's there's no clearly definable story. I just wanted to compare, for instance, the opening paragraphs of a handful of stories, 73 00:07:56,970 --> 00:08:05,330 all of which appeared in the magazine in the last couple of years. So his one on the short walk from the churchyard to her car, Mrs. Craft Thorpe, 74 00:08:05,330 --> 00:08:09,440 was aware of a profound humiliation, a lone mourner at her husband's funeral. 75 00:08:09,440 --> 00:08:15,560 She had sensed it first in the modest country church he had insisted upon for what he called his obsequious. 76 00:08:15,560 --> 00:08:19,550 A woman cleric unknown to Mrs. Staub, had conducted a bleak service, 77 00:08:19,550 --> 00:08:23,750 had said the necessary words in an accent that appalled Mrs Cress Thorpe and then 78 00:08:23,750 --> 00:08:29,550 had scuffled off the Dutch without so much as a glance and Mrs Thorpe's direction. 79 00:08:29,550 --> 00:08:36,660 Or. You hop into a car race off in no particular direction and blam hit a power pole, then it's off to jail. 80 00:08:36,660 --> 00:08:42,600 I remember a monstrous tangle of arms and legs and fists with me at the bottom, gouging it eyes and doing my utmost to mangle throats. 81 00:08:42,600 --> 00:08:47,490 But I arrived at the facility without a scratch or a bruise. I must have been easy to subdue. 82 00:08:47,490 --> 00:08:54,540 The following Monday, I pled guilty to disturbing the peace and malicious mischief reduced from felony vehicular theft and resisting arrest. 83 00:08:54,540 --> 00:08:59,040 Because, well, because all this occurs on another planet, the planet of Thanksgiving. 84 00:08:59,040 --> 00:09:03,960 Nineteen sixty seven or. 85 00:09:03,960 --> 00:09:08,580 But nobody showed up. So he sat a while looking at the wall. It was one of those Saturdays. 86 00:09:08,580 --> 00:09:12,420 It feel like Sunday. He didn't know how to explain this. 87 00:09:12,420 --> 00:09:20,220 It happened intermittently, more often in the warmer months, and it was probably normal, although he'd never discussed it with anyone. 88 00:09:20,220 --> 00:09:26,910 Finally, there's an urge to be good to be seen, to be good, to be seen also to be badness, 89 00:09:26,910 --> 00:09:31,890 invisibility, things as they are in reality, as opposed to things as they seem death itself. 90 00:09:31,890 --> 00:09:35,250 These are out of fashion. This is basically what I told Mary. 91 00:09:35,250 --> 00:09:38,490 I said, Mary. All these things I just mentioned are not really done anymore. 92 00:09:38,490 --> 00:09:41,820 And also, while we're on the subject that name of yours, it's not going to fly. 93 00:09:41,820 --> 00:09:48,480 Nobody's called Mary these days. It's painful for me even to say your name actually, could you get the [INAUDIBLE] out of here? 94 00:09:48,480 --> 00:09:54,630 So there's a special prise for anyone who names all four writers. 95 00:09:54,630 --> 00:10:00,930 So the second thing you find yourself up against when editing fiction for The New Yorker is the pedestal that the magazine stands on in the US, 96 00:10:00,930 --> 00:10:03,330 simply because of the weight of its history, 97 00:10:03,330 --> 00:10:11,980 which makes people either want to worship at its feet or drive up the bulldozers to to knock it over, and sometimes both. 98 00:10:11,980 --> 00:10:13,440 In nineteen twenty five, 99 00:10:13,440 --> 00:10:20,670 the magazine sold to about fourteen thousand people a week and outreach as well over a million and print and millions more online, 100 00:10:20,670 --> 00:10:29,100 which gives it the largest potential audience for magazine fiction in the world. I think I didn't fact check that, but I believe it's true. 101 00:10:29,100 --> 00:10:32,550 Over the last 94 years, the fiction department has had many successes. 102 00:10:32,550 --> 00:10:38,520 It has fostered the careers of such writers as William Maxwell, Alice Munro, John Updike, Vladimir Nabokov, 103 00:10:38,520 --> 00:10:45,690 Donald Barthélemy and Mavis Gallant and O'Brien, Zadie Smith, Junot Diaz, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. 104 00:10:45,690 --> 00:10:52,290 So many others. Some writers have come directly to the magazine, some through other advocates, 105 00:10:52,290 --> 00:10:57,810 and some have been pulled out of the infamous and now viral, not viral virtual slush pile. 106 00:10:57,810 --> 00:11:02,910 Sometimes viral, the fiction department has also had some notable missteps. 107 00:11:02,910 --> 00:11:09,330 That's rejected stories by Gertrude Stein, Flannery O'Connor, Thomas Pynchon, Jack Kerouac, Joseph Joseph Heller, 108 00:11:09,330 --> 00:11:16,080 William Styron, Philip Roth, J.D. Salinger, as well as many other writers that also eventually publish. 109 00:11:16,080 --> 00:11:17,790 Early in my years at the magazine, 110 00:11:17,790 --> 00:11:25,740 I called a publisher to say that we wanted to publish one of the last existing unpublished stories by the late Richard Yates, 111 00:11:25,740 --> 00:11:33,120 and I was told that to his dying day, Yates kept had kept a rejection letter from a fiction editor at the magazine, 112 00:11:33,120 --> 00:11:40,200 telling him never to darken our door with his sentimental fiction again. 113 00:11:40,200 --> 00:11:44,610 Some writers were rejected many times before their stories finally made it in. 114 00:11:44,610 --> 00:11:51,060 In 1972, a story by NBT, who was then a twenty five year old English instructor, 115 00:11:51,060 --> 00:11:58,650 arrived in the slush pile and eventually reached the desk of Roger Angell, who was a fiction editor at the magazine for more than 60 years. 116 00:11:58,650 --> 00:12:06,020 He liked the story enough to write her personal response. These little slices and moments are often surprisingly effective, he wrote. 117 00:12:06,020 --> 00:12:13,100 But the story seems to get away from you as it goes along. It seems possible that there's more form than substance here, but perhaps that's unfair. 118 00:12:13,100 --> 00:12:19,900 What I most admire is your wit and quickness and self-assurance. I hope you will let us see more of your work. 119 00:12:19,900 --> 00:12:28,960 So she did. And over the next two years, Roger rejected 15 more of beauty stories, writing in various letters. 120 00:12:28,960 --> 00:12:34,270 I would prefer to see writing that is less dependent on effects, and that works less visibly toward a single final emotion. 121 00:12:34,270 --> 00:12:36,580 I do believe this is a matter of confidence on your part. 122 00:12:36,580 --> 00:12:45,100 You write so well that a slightly less fevered effort may result in fiction that is clearer and more truly moving. 123 00:12:45,100 --> 00:12:49,420 I have the impression that you don't trust your own observations or your own writing to carry a story. 124 00:12:49,420 --> 00:12:55,070 What would happen if you tried a story without any devices or stops or studied juxtapositions? 125 00:12:55,070 --> 00:13:02,420 Next, I wish you would try a very quiet and modest story, one that relies on no devices and is content merely to bring us to its discoveries. 126 00:13:02,420 --> 00:13:09,760 But whatever you do right, please continue to send it to us. This strikes me as being merely chic. 127 00:13:09,760 --> 00:13:13,030 The obvious despair, heartlessness in high places, lurking violence, 128 00:13:13,030 --> 00:13:20,200 it's all been done a thousand times and it's just about impossible to believe any of it or to care. 129 00:13:20,200 --> 00:13:24,040 She kept sending. I truly don't know what to tell you now. 130 00:13:24,040 --> 00:13:27,820 I think you're writing is controlled and personal. That is exactly what you want it to be. 131 00:13:27,820 --> 00:13:33,580 I feel that your chances of acceptance here are not good as long as you continue in this vein. 132 00:13:33,580 --> 00:13:41,200 And then the 17th story arrived. Roger wrote back, Oh joy. 133 00:13:41,200 --> 00:13:45,160 Yes, we were taking the story, and I think this is just about the best news of the year. 134 00:13:45,160 --> 00:13:49,300 Maybe it isn't the best news for you, but there is nothing that gives me more pleasure. 135 00:13:49,300 --> 00:13:57,370 Well, almost nothing than at last, sending an enthusiastic yes to a writer who has persisted through his many rejections and rebuffs as you have. 136 00:13:57,370 --> 00:14:05,320 It's a fine story, I think original, strong and true. Other writers took even longer to make it into the magazine. 137 00:14:05,320 --> 00:14:13,880 I'll read you a letter from Cynthia Ozick that was written in nineteen sixty two, about 20 years before she actually was published in the magazine. 138 00:14:13,880 --> 00:14:21,080 She writes for a number of years now, I've been sending you poems, and until very recently, I have always found you entirely reliable. 139 00:14:21,080 --> 00:14:26,420 Exactly seven days after each new poem has been dropped into the mail, it has come punctually home, 140 00:14:26,420 --> 00:14:31,040 accompanied by that little rejection slip of yours marked with the number one in the left hand corner. 141 00:14:31,040 --> 00:14:35,780 You know, the one you have, as I say, been altogether faithful and dependable. 142 00:14:35,780 --> 00:14:41,090 For example, it is never six days. It is certainly never eight or nine days. It is always seven days to the minute. 143 00:14:41,090 --> 00:14:47,150 And your conscientious devotion to precision all these years has been matched to my knowledge only by the butcher's delivery boy, 144 00:14:47,150 --> 00:14:53,120 whose appearance is also predicated on a seven day cycle. This time, however, you failed me. 145 00:14:53,120 --> 00:15:02,780 A poem of mine reached you on December 18th, 1961, and though 18 days have already passed, a daily inspection of my letterbox yields nothing. 146 00:15:02,780 --> 00:15:07,640 I have enough confidence in your hitherto clean record of never considering anything I've submitted 147 00:15:07,640 --> 00:15:13,130 not to be tempted into the unworthy suspicion that the delay is caused by your liking this poem. 148 00:15:13,130 --> 00:15:20,150 What has been shattered, I must admit, is my sense of serenity of certitude, nay of security, not to mention my sense of rhythm. 149 00:15:20,150 --> 00:15:27,000 Does this mean you can no longer be relied relied on to conform to the seven day schedule you have consistently adhered to in the past? 150 00:15:27,000 --> 00:15:36,150 Ensure it is the age of doubt, truly upon us or but I venture this with a cheery hopefulness I do not dare to feel, 151 00:15:36,150 --> 00:15:40,230 is it only that you have finally gone and lost my manuscript? 152 00:15:40,230 --> 00:15:46,800 I realise I'm probably being too sanguine and putting forth this rosy possibility, but I guess I'm just basically an optimistic sort. 153 00:15:46,800 --> 00:15:49,800 Please reassure me that this rather than some flaw in your clockwork, 154 00:15:49,800 --> 00:15:55,350 even to contemplate which disillusioned me hideously is the real nature of the difficulty. 155 00:15:55,350 --> 00:16:03,900 I expect your answer in seven days, so people tend to think that editing fiction involves looking at manuscripts that 156 00:16:03,900 --> 00:16:07,950 have been submitted to you and knowing instantly whether it's a yes or a no. 157 00:16:07,950 --> 00:16:15,600 They usually imagine that that decision is based on either some kind of empirical scientific assessment or some mysterious form of insight, 158 00:16:15,600 --> 00:16:22,080 and neither one of those is true. It's always a matter of making a judgement call, and in a situation like the current one, 159 00:16:22,080 --> 00:16:26,760 where there are three or four editors who work on fiction, these judgements don't always match. 160 00:16:26,760 --> 00:16:33,300 Each of us receive submissions. We read them. We decide if something's worth working with, something's worth fighting for. 161 00:16:33,300 --> 00:16:38,700 We pass them around to the others, and we write notes on the pros and cons of each story. 162 00:16:38,700 --> 00:16:46,500 And then we meet once a week to discuss it and battle it out. When I am just a side note, when I started at the magazine, 163 00:16:46,500 --> 00:16:53,640 these notes were all typed on typewriters on the same piece of paper, and each time one editor read the story, 164 00:16:53,640 --> 00:17:00,630 they would type their note, but then fold it over so the next person wouldn't read their note before reading the story and typing his or her note. 165 00:17:00,630 --> 00:17:07,020 So at the end, what you got was a sort of exquisite corpse of fiction opinions. 166 00:17:07,020 --> 00:17:12,540 Now, of course, it's all done by email and not to keep harping on Roger Angell. 167 00:17:12,540 --> 00:17:20,490 But for a long stretch of my time at the magazine, he Roger, in his late 80s and the 90s, is now 98. 168 00:17:20,490 --> 00:17:24,900 Continue reading and opining in the fiction department and in his notes on stories 169 00:17:24,900 --> 00:17:32,130 were classics of the form that taught the rest of us how to have strong opinions. 170 00:17:32,130 --> 00:17:36,600 So it's going to quotes him some choice lines. This is readable, all right. 171 00:17:36,600 --> 00:17:40,230 It's like eating whipped cream, but it's way too folksy and sentimental for me. 172 00:17:40,230 --> 00:17:47,040 We've avoided sweet dumbed down writing like this over the years, and I don't really think we should start now. 173 00:17:47,040 --> 00:17:49,530 I don't think we should mess with this. It's off the charts, 174 00:17:49,530 --> 00:17:59,950 pretentious beginning with the title and the Explorer and the corpse Gold Sea and going on page after embarrassing page in a tide of self-importance. 175 00:17:59,950 --> 00:18:07,510 This story is already the winner of our twenty seven a.m. most mannered manuscript award. 176 00:18:07,510 --> 00:18:14,350 It's no contest I quit after two pages, really couldn't go on reading, so I'm against it. 177 00:18:14,350 --> 00:18:20,790 And they weren't all negative. I like parts of this very much and enjoy the childlike semi mythical tone she's established here. 178 00:18:20,790 --> 00:18:27,090 She can write no doubt about it. That said, I strongly believe the great sections of this still need major work and that if we don't edit 179 00:18:27,090 --> 00:18:31,680 her much farther back and try to persuade her to get rid of dozens of misconceived childish. 180 00:18:31,680 --> 00:18:35,880 Not the same as childlike notions and persistent exaggerations. 181 00:18:35,880 --> 00:18:40,350 We won't have come close to how good and how funny and how touching this could really be. 182 00:18:40,350 --> 00:18:46,360 Please, please, let's not hurry to get this into the magazine. We owe it to ourselves into her to try to make it right. 183 00:18:46,360 --> 00:18:52,320 Which gets me to the next stage, so once that once a story has actually made it through that struggle and been accepted. 184 00:18:52,320 --> 00:18:56,640 That process is far from over. Some writers rewrite significantly. 185 00:18:56,640 --> 00:19:02,370 Some are asked to consider taking away whole scenes or adding characters, 186 00:19:02,370 --> 00:19:08,280 and others just need to fix some awkward transitions or grammatical problems. 187 00:19:08,280 --> 00:19:18,420 There's virtually always some form of editorial collaboration, and although it was a surprise to me initially, it's not really anymore. 188 00:19:18,420 --> 00:19:28,980 It's usually the most established and experienced writers who are the least who respond the most cheerfully and gratefully to editorial suggestions. 189 00:19:28,980 --> 00:19:41,550 I used to. Alice Munro doesn't write anymore, but you know, she she used to write for The New Yorker a lot, and she I would send her proofs by FedEx. 190 00:19:41,550 --> 00:19:52,110 She would call me up and she would read through my proofs saying Yes, OK, better, much better, much better. 191 00:19:52,110 --> 00:19:54,870 I think I'm going to keep this one. 192 00:19:54,870 --> 00:20:01,800 And then when she got to the end of a page, audibly toss it onto the floor and then sometimes we need to go back to something. 193 00:20:01,800 --> 00:20:07,470 She would crawl around on the floor for a while trying to find the correct page. Most often, she anticipated edits. 194 00:20:07,470 --> 00:20:11,580 Before I said anything, I would be about to call her, and she would. 195 00:20:11,580 --> 00:20:15,660 A FedEx would come in the mail with rewritten pages where she had fixed exactly the problem. 196 00:20:15,660 --> 00:20:22,800 I was about to point out years ago, when he was still alive, I was editing a piece by Saul Bellow, 197 00:20:22,800 --> 00:20:28,140 an excerpt from a novel in which I had taken sections from lots of different places in the book. 198 00:20:28,140 --> 00:20:37,480 And sort of. Intertwine them and put them together and and I thought, you know, he's going to be incredibly offended by this. 199 00:20:37,480 --> 00:20:43,550 I'm going to get a call from the agent saying, How dare you do this to the, you know, the great man's work? 200 00:20:43,550 --> 00:20:49,070 I got no calls, so after a little while, I sort of nervously called him up. 201 00:20:49,070 --> 00:20:54,200 And I said, Mr. Bellow, did you have a chance to look at that edit I sent you? 202 00:20:54,200 --> 00:21:00,110 And he said. Well, you convinced me. 203 00:21:00,110 --> 00:21:05,540 Do you have any changes now? So that it's not always that way? 204 00:21:05,540 --> 00:21:10,490 There was one. Celebrated British author. 205 00:21:10,490 --> 00:21:18,540 Who to whom I sent a what I thought was a very light proof on a story and he he called me and said. 206 00:21:18,540 --> 00:21:30,390 You know, what I sent you was not a draught. It was a finished story. 207 00:21:30,390 --> 00:21:39,180 So then there's the New Yorker process of not only editing and copy editing, but also fact checking fiction, 208 00:21:39,180 --> 00:21:48,810 which comes as a surprise to some people but actually can be surprisingly helpful because if you put a story, 209 00:21:48,810 --> 00:21:52,740 if you send a story into the world, you want people to believe it on some level. 210 00:21:52,740 --> 00:22:00,290 And if you get basic details about if you have an intersection of streets that don't actually cross. 211 00:22:00,290 --> 00:22:05,000 Someone is going to be pulled out of that story and it will register as made up 212 00:22:05,000 --> 00:22:08,330 and made up by someone who is not an authority on what he or she is writing about. 213 00:22:08,330 --> 00:22:13,640 So in some ways, in some ways fact checking is is very helpful. 214 00:22:13,640 --> 00:22:22,330 It can also cause problems. A few years ago, I was working on a story by a writer who had become famous as a film director. 215 00:22:22,330 --> 00:22:29,500 It's not Tom Hanks, and it was going to be his first fiction publication, he was very anxious about it, 216 00:22:29,500 --> 00:22:34,240 so he didn't really want to change anything just in case, you know, the whole thing fell apart. 217 00:22:34,240 --> 00:22:46,040 You know, if you changed, a comment was made him nervous, and the story involved a little boy who liked to eat omelettes with Smucker's grape jelly. 218 00:22:46,040 --> 00:22:55,850 And the fact checker got a hold of this and looked it up and found that Smucker's didn't make great jelly, so she suggested Welch's grape jelly. 219 00:22:55,850 --> 00:23:00,630 So I called him up and he said, No, it has to be Smuckers. It has to be Smuckers. 220 00:23:00,630 --> 00:23:05,100 So she did some research, and she found a list of every jelly that Smucker's made at that time, 221 00:23:05,100 --> 00:23:12,180 and I sent it to him and I said, maybe plum jelly because same colour is grape jelly. 222 00:23:12,180 --> 00:23:17,690 Might be sort of the same in this boy's sort of cosmos of jellies. 223 00:23:17,690 --> 00:23:22,890 And and he called me up and he said, No, not plum daily. 224 00:23:22,890 --> 00:23:27,570 It has to be Smuckers mixed berry jelly. And I said, Well, you know, this is a little boy. 225 00:23:27,570 --> 00:23:32,460 What does mixed berry mean? Like children? They're going to say, I don't like blueberries. 226 00:23:32,460 --> 00:23:37,700 What if there's blueberries in there? How can you get obsessed about mixed berry? It's very vague. 227 00:23:37,700 --> 00:23:42,870 These are no mixed berry. So we changed it to mixed berry jelly. Story went to press. 228 00:23:42,870 --> 00:23:49,230 The next day. He called me in a panic. It has to be one jelly. So there are times. 229 00:23:49,230 --> 00:23:55,710 Then we put out a story moving on, expecting a huge reaction to it, and nothing happens. 230 00:23:55,710 --> 00:24:04,130 And there are other times when stories generate unexpected, unexpectedly explosive responses. 231 00:24:04,130 --> 00:24:10,280 One famous example of the latter was Shirley Jackson's All to Credible Story, Horror Story The Lottery, 232 00:24:10,280 --> 00:24:15,170 which was published in 1948 and inspired more than 300 letters to the magazine, 233 00:24:15,170 --> 00:24:21,380 which was more than any other story that have been published at that point, most of which were either. 234 00:24:21,380 --> 00:24:31,310 Bewildered or quite aggressive things like I will never buy The New Yorker again, I resent being tricked into reading perverted stories. 235 00:24:31,310 --> 00:24:44,300 I expect a personal apology from the author. Tell Miss Jackson to stay out of Canada. 236 00:24:44,300 --> 00:24:46,760 So Jackson later wrote about this experience. 237 00:24:46,760 --> 00:24:53,810 Said one of the most terrifying aspects of publishing stories and books is the realisation that they are going to be read and read by strangers. 238 00:24:53,810 --> 00:24:57,660 I had never fully realised this before, although I had, of course, in my imagination, 239 00:24:57,660 --> 00:25:04,850 lovingly upon the thought of the millions and millions of people who were going to be uplifted and enriched and delighted by the stories I wrote. 240 00:25:04,850 --> 00:25:08,210 It had simply never occurred to me that these millions and millions of people 241 00:25:08,210 --> 00:25:13,490 might be so far from being uplifted that they would sit down and write me letters. I was downright scared to open. 242 00:25:13,490 --> 00:25:17,390 Of course, the lottery became one of the most anthologies short stories in history, 243 00:25:17,390 --> 00:25:23,270 and my older daughter had to read it in her sixth grade English class a few years ago. 244 00:25:23,270 --> 00:25:31,010 So you could say that the lottery coming just a few years after World War Two and in the early days of the House un-American Activities Committee, 245 00:25:31,010 --> 00:25:33,320 hit a kind of nerve and so did a story. 246 00:25:33,320 --> 00:25:40,940 We published a year and a half ago Cat Person by Christian Repentant, which was more or less a first published story by an unknown writer. 247 00:25:40,940 --> 00:25:48,230 It's a story that simply about a first date that goes wrong, and it hit many nerves, 248 00:25:48,230 --> 00:25:57,380 so it had been written and sent to me months before Harvey Weinstein's crimes and misdemeanours were exposed and the MeToo movement was launched. 249 00:25:57,380 --> 00:26:07,720 But it? And it's kind of complicated dissection of communication between an older man and a younger woman who barely know each other. 250 00:26:07,720 --> 00:26:13,180 And mistake. A connexion through texts for real intimacy. 251 00:26:13,180 --> 00:26:18,160 It seemed it seemed for the moment, and so much so that people, a lot of readers, mistook it for memoir, 252 00:26:18,160 --> 00:26:23,980 even though it was written in the third person word spread through Twitter other social networks. 253 00:26:23,980 --> 00:26:31,390 And the story has now had, I think, five and a half million hits on NewYorker.com, which is more not only unprecedented for fiction, 254 00:26:31,390 --> 00:26:36,910 but it's beat out every other non-fiction piece on the website in the last year and a half. 255 00:26:36,910 --> 00:26:42,910 And I just thought it was interesting. That opinion echoed Jackson's thoughts 70 years later, she said. 256 00:26:42,910 --> 00:26:46,390 I want people to read my stories. Of course I do. That's why I write them. 257 00:26:46,390 --> 00:26:52,480 But knowing in that immediate and unmediated way, what people thought about my writing felt the word I keep reaching for, 258 00:26:52,480 --> 00:26:57,710 even though it seems melodramatic, is annihilating to be faced with all those people thinking and talking about me. 259 00:26:57,710 --> 00:27:03,130 It was like standing alone at the centre of a stadium while thousands of people screamed at me at the top of their lungs. 260 00:27:03,130 --> 00:27:09,850 Not for me at me. I guess some people might find this exhilarating. I did not. 261 00:27:09,850 --> 00:27:14,320 So I was always on some level. As a fiction editor, 262 00:27:14,320 --> 00:27:20,320 you have to think when putting out first stories in particular by unknown writers 263 00:27:20,320 --> 00:27:23,140 about whether you're actually doing them a favour or not doing them a favour. 264 00:27:23,140 --> 00:27:29,880 And in this case it was complicated, but it wasn't anything we could have predicted. 265 00:27:29,880 --> 00:27:35,690 Editing fiction in magazine form, at least, is not always a garden of delights. 266 00:27:35,690 --> 00:27:41,310 I forget where you called it in your introduction and perpetually fascinating job it is, 267 00:27:41,310 --> 00:27:48,720 but it on one level it sort of fundamentally thankless because there's no way to please everyone. 268 00:27:48,720 --> 00:27:56,370 And editing stories is a bit like having children. They come to you with with this DNA and potential in place, 269 00:27:56,370 --> 00:28:02,490 and you do what you can to help them achieve their potential and become their best possible selves. 270 00:28:02,490 --> 00:28:06,270 And with stories, when you do a good job, the writer gets the credit. 271 00:28:06,270 --> 00:28:13,530 If you do a bad job, you get blamed for ruining what was obviously a fantastic story before you got your hands on it. 272 00:28:13,530 --> 00:28:17,670 And I've been blamed for ruining stories I didn't even edit. 273 00:28:17,670 --> 00:28:27,060 And I find that when people really like a story, they tend to tell their friends about it and when they are upset by it, they write to the editor. 274 00:28:27,060 --> 00:28:32,700 So the feedback, the feedback that I get is primarily of this sort. 275 00:28:32,700 --> 00:28:36,900 Your fiction isn't worth reading these days. It's unappealing without interest or value. 276 00:28:36,900 --> 00:28:42,960 Two paragraphs in and it's a stop. Everyone with an iPad is a writer these days, so it shouldn't be a problem finding good stuff. 277 00:28:42,960 --> 00:28:47,340 How about giving it a try? 278 00:28:47,340 --> 00:28:57,360 Or after finishing your most recent piece of fiction, I begin to wonder if your editors do not need some immediate intervention for depression. 279 00:28:57,360 --> 00:29:01,740 So depression aside, there often comes a moment when you're working on a story, 280 00:29:01,740 --> 00:29:08,700 and I am assuming this is something writers feel on a good day when something in the voice of that story becomes clear, 281 00:29:08,700 --> 00:29:12,810 something that's sort of hovering just below the surface of what's actually been written. 282 00:29:12,810 --> 00:29:17,370 And you see something and you see if I move that paragraph two pages earlier, 283 00:29:17,370 --> 00:29:21,900 the balance of this story is going to change and readers will feel what happens. 284 00:29:21,900 --> 00:29:29,130 Five pages later, much more strongly. Or if I cut this foreshadowing here, then on page 18, people will be deeply surprised. 285 00:29:29,130 --> 00:29:31,720 And perhaps the ending doesn't work. 286 00:29:31,720 --> 00:29:39,240 Perhaps the story wants to go in another direction, and there's kind of an energised forward motion to what you're doing, 287 00:29:39,240 --> 00:29:43,470 and you enter into this story you can see in all directions within it, 288 00:29:43,470 --> 00:29:50,460 and then you go to the writer with these thoughts, and most of the time he or she agrees or gives it a try. 289 00:29:50,460 --> 00:29:58,730 Every once in a while, you're wrong. But if you're. Good at what you do most of the time, you're right, and the writer takes it from there. 290 00:29:58,730 --> 00:30:03,500 And there's just this enormous jolt of pleasure in feeling like you've you've improved this 291 00:30:03,500 --> 00:30:09,300 small piece of the world which is going to outlive you and outlive the writer as well. 292 00:30:09,300 --> 00:30:16,560 So there's one person I would like to have the last word on the New Yorker's editing process, and that's Vladimir Nabokov. 293 00:30:16,560 --> 00:30:19,260 Who went through it countless times with Katherine White, 294 00:30:19,260 --> 00:30:29,790 who was the first fiction editor of the magazine and it was women and was also the mother of Roger Angel and married to be white. 295 00:30:29,790 --> 00:30:39,420 So in an essay, Nabokov wrote a kind of mock review of his own book, Conclusive Evidence, which was later titled Speak Memory. 296 00:30:39,420 --> 00:30:45,120 And he writes, part of this essay says there are discrepancies between the present text and The New Yorker, 297 00:30:45,120 --> 00:30:48,870 one which are to be explained by the authors reinstating a few scattered words or 298 00:30:48,870 --> 00:30:54,510 clusters of words that had been left out with his reluctant consent by The New Yorker, 299 00:30:54,510 --> 00:30:58,740 either for family magazine reasons or because the New Yorker pessimistically 300 00:30:58,740 --> 00:31:02,760 thought that an unusual term might bother some of its less brainy readers. 301 00:31:02,760 --> 00:31:08,190 And the latter case, Mr. Nabokov did not always give in, and this resulted in some spirited fights. 302 00:31:08,190 --> 00:31:12,810 Some of them, such as the Battle of the Pepperell Night Nabokov lost. 303 00:31:12,810 --> 00:31:20,160 Others he won. Finally, there was the question of corrected grammar as an English writing author, and Nabokov, as always, felt insecure. 304 00:31:20,160 --> 00:31:25,740 For all the dash and racy ness of his English, he has a way of lapsing into Solace isms, 305 00:31:25,740 --> 00:31:29,760 some of which are rather astonishing in view of his general sophistication. 306 00:31:29,760 --> 00:31:36,900 Therefore, the minor improvements suggested by the New Yorker editors the curing of an inversion, the bracing up of some awkwardly drooping term, 307 00:31:36,900 --> 00:31:45,390 the splitting of a long sentence into the ritualistic transformation of witches into that's where meekly and gratefully accepted by Mr. Nabokov. 308 00:31:45,390 --> 00:31:53,250 What skirmishes there were took place, usually around the editors inadvertently destroying a treasured rhythm or wrongly interpreting an illusion 309 00:31:53,250 --> 00:31:59,730 or tending to tending to replaced by nouns every he she and we that had strayed into the next paragraph, 310 00:31:59,730 --> 00:32:07,800 leaving the reader to scratch his little head and more. Especially there was the missing antecedent case that cropped up again and again, 311 00:32:07,800 --> 00:32:13,620 leading to many tussles in the course of which Mr. Nabokov and anti antecedent of long standing often knew defeat, 312 00:32:13,620 --> 00:32:20,380 but also won a few choice victories. It would seem at the very beginning of Nabokov's association with the New Yorker, 313 00:32:20,380 --> 00:32:26,590 editorial attempts to clarify seeming ambiguities and trim his prose were much more carefree and frequent than a little later. 314 00:32:26,590 --> 00:32:34,540 Stage howls of pain would come from the author and mutterings about the unworthiness of compliance with the magazine's tastes. 315 00:32:34,540 --> 00:32:40,600 Gradually, however, the editing department realised that the labour had expended on the construction of a solid bridge to join. 316 00:32:40,600 --> 00:32:47,920 Any two ideas that seemed to exceed the span of a commuters mind was a rather unnecessary, albeit well-meaning, procedure. 317 00:32:47,920 --> 00:32:54,460 Since the author had taken even more trouble to destroy or lift or camouflage a bridge that spoil the landscape, 318 00:32:54,460 --> 00:33:02,140 the reader, however, must now be shown the other side of the matter. Great sympathy, a delicate and loving care mark to all editorial queries. 319 00:33:02,140 --> 00:33:10,090 The explanations or amplifications now and then asked for were often granted by Mr. Nabokov and resulted in some delightful new paragraphs. 320 00:33:10,090 --> 00:33:13,060 Katherine White, who corresponded with the author in regard to all these matters, 321 00:33:13,060 --> 00:33:17,050 took endless trouble to check every hyphen and comma and smooth the creases and 322 00:33:17,050 --> 00:33:22,670 her author's ruffled temper and do everything to keep Nabokov's prose intact. 323 00:33:22,670 --> 00:33:38,080 Thank you very much. We need both. 324 00:33:38,080 --> 00:33:41,740 That was that was wonderful, thank you so much. 325 00:33:41,740 --> 00:33:50,800 One of the things that was so fascinating to me about that talk was the way you revealed this whole shadow world of texts that orbit The New Yorker. 326 00:33:50,800 --> 00:33:55,420 So the letter that the editors are sending to one another that unbelievably intense 327 00:33:55,420 --> 00:34:01,150 and intimate letters Cynthia Ozick writes to who exactly is unclear and no one right? 328 00:34:01,150 --> 00:34:05,470 And I'm curious if we had more of that material from today. 329 00:34:05,470 --> 00:34:11,920 What would it reveal about the differences in taste or sensibility between you and your fellow fiction editors? 330 00:34:11,920 --> 00:34:19,990 Well, if you circulated the notes on various stories, yeah, you would see you would see something. 331 00:34:19,990 --> 00:34:30,970 I mean, I think it's I make it a point to have people in the fiction department who don't agree because if we're only catering to one person's taste, 332 00:34:30,970 --> 00:34:37,540 we're not catering to the audience. And although I don't think the audience should be in a writer's mind, 333 00:34:37,540 --> 00:34:42,460 I think it does need to be in an editor's mind when editing for a certain publication. 334 00:34:42,460 --> 00:34:52,590 And I just think you don't need to underestimate people's ability to stretch and that we should publish things across the spectrum. 335 00:34:52,590 --> 00:34:56,410 How do you think will serve Nabokov when you look at his correspondences with White? 336 00:34:56,410 --> 00:35:03,370 He certainly is thinking about the New Yorker reader. In addition to The New Yorker's, Ryan White was thinking more intensely about that. 337 00:35:03,370 --> 00:35:12,610 And at a time when you have twenty thousand readers or fifty thousand readers, you have less variety right than when you have millions. 338 00:35:12,610 --> 00:35:18,490 So how do you think about the audience now? So. 339 00:35:18,490 --> 00:35:25,810 I don't have any particular preconceived notion, I mean, I think at the magazine for a long time, especially when I first started, 340 00:35:25,810 --> 00:35:32,710 there was a sense that we were going on publishing fiction every week because we 341 00:35:32,710 --> 00:35:37,330 were sort of high and mighty and we believed in it and we believed in literature, 342 00:35:37,330 --> 00:35:40,120 but no one was actually reading it. 343 00:35:40,120 --> 00:35:47,570 And this was because people on the subway didn't often see people reading the fiction piece, you know, in any given week. 344 00:35:47,570 --> 00:35:54,400 And the idea was perhaps we were just publishing for a group of twenty thousand writers so they could get jealous of each other. 345 00:35:54,400 --> 00:36:00,700 Well, writers are so, so then the web happened and. 346 00:36:00,700 --> 00:36:09,520 And we could have more, more insight into who was reading what and how they were reading it. 347 00:36:09,520 --> 00:36:15,010 And in any given week, with the exception of a cat person, the fiction is never the most popular thing. 348 00:36:15,010 --> 00:36:20,260 But the fiction has a shelf life, you know, whereas a piece about Hillary Clinton doesn't, you know, 349 00:36:20,260 --> 00:36:26,920 it's not relevant to your later, not in the same way when the story has lost none of its relevance. 350 00:36:26,920 --> 00:36:35,420 So, so there's that. There's also. On a more mercenary level, 351 00:36:35,420 --> 00:36:46,340 the research was done and it was discovered that the readers who come to the New Yorker website to read fiction are by far 352 00:36:46,340 --> 00:36:52,130 the most likely people to pull out their credit cards and pay for a subscription because they're not there for a headline. 353 00:36:52,130 --> 00:36:56,300 They're there for a text, and they might prefer reading on paper. 354 00:36:56,300 --> 00:37:04,700 We also started a podcast, so I had Tara mentioned by the New Yorker fiction podcast, and that was just sort of a shot in the dark. 355 00:37:04,700 --> 00:37:11,660 Let's make use of our fiction archives. Let's have contemporary reader writers read stories by other people and talk about them, 356 00:37:11,660 --> 00:37:19,580 and it's been a huge amount of fun to do that because these are already published stories. 357 00:37:19,580 --> 00:37:20,660 I didn't edit them. 358 00:37:20,660 --> 00:37:29,780 I get to dive into them with some, whether the intelligent writer who knows who has a strong opinion on what makes that story work. 359 00:37:29,780 --> 00:37:35,030 And we got to kind of play around within that story. 360 00:37:35,030 --> 00:37:40,010 And the writers usually like it because they get tired of talking about themselves and promoting themselves, 361 00:37:40,010 --> 00:37:42,050 and they get to talk about something else. 362 00:37:42,050 --> 00:37:50,090 And this went out into the world and now has something like three hundred and fifty thousand downloads a month, 363 00:37:50,090 --> 00:37:58,010 which is more than twenty thousand writers getting jealous of each other. So it just was confirmation that people are really. 364 00:37:58,010 --> 00:38:06,320 Reading fiction engaged by fiction, people like to be read too, and that there's a whole world out there, readers. 365 00:38:06,320 --> 00:38:13,250 But you're also a sort of massive institution of taste making right. You can make a writer's career the way that you did with Propeny. 366 00:38:13,250 --> 00:38:16,640 And so do you think quite we started the kinds, right? 367 00:38:16,640 --> 00:38:18,470 She can write it. She can make it. Yeah. 368 00:38:18,470 --> 00:38:29,060 Do you think quite actively about the kinds of careers that you want to make, the kinds of fiction that you want to see circulating in the world? 369 00:38:29,060 --> 00:38:35,630 For months, you know, and it may be a little naive, especially in cases like Christian Rebellion, 370 00:38:35,630 --> 00:38:41,960 but I think our focus is really on the story rather than on the writer and the writer's future. 371 00:38:41,960 --> 00:38:47,240 Sometimes I have in the past felt a little anxious about first time writers. 372 00:38:47,240 --> 00:38:52,070 You put out a story, they suddenly get a big large advance for a question. 373 00:38:52,070 --> 00:38:56,510 They might not be ready yet. They might not have written anything else that was as good as that one story. 374 00:38:56,510 --> 00:39:03,500 They might need another five years to muddle around and before they have that kind of pressure put on them. 375 00:39:03,500 --> 00:39:12,120 And although. You know, as you heard Christian repenting and was not delighted by the attention now got her to a deal, 376 00:39:12,120 --> 00:39:20,910 and that's wonderful, and she now can write comfortably and go on in whatever direction she wants to. 377 00:39:20,910 --> 00:39:29,110 With financial security. But. It also puts so much pressure on that first book, right, because if millions of people love one story, 378 00:39:29,110 --> 00:39:34,180 they open this book and they see that the 11 other stories are not like that story, right? 379 00:39:34,180 --> 00:39:37,810 Then they're disappointed. Right? So and that was quite a bit of the yeah. 380 00:39:37,810 --> 00:39:43,990 The reviews of that book. I was really interested to hear you talk about taking bellows, which bellow novel was that, 381 00:39:43,990 --> 00:39:48,820 by the way, you know, relisted about taking that novel and making it into a story. 382 00:39:48,820 --> 00:39:56,500 And I was wondering what you think the relationship is between the short story and the novel, because you guys often do excerpts. 383 00:39:56,500 --> 00:40:01,210 We do novels, don't we do fewer than than you would think? I mean, usually three to five a year? 384 00:40:01,210 --> 00:40:09,640 Yeah, it's really. So we have a requirement in that situation, which is whatever we publish has to at least feel like a story. 385 00:40:09,640 --> 00:40:14,080 It has to feel conclusive and self-contained. It has to be a satisfying read. 386 00:40:14,080 --> 00:40:20,140 It can't just be a teaser for a novel. It's going to come out not doing ads, right? 387 00:40:20,140 --> 00:40:26,920 So very few novels lend themselves to that. And it's it's sometimes quite difficult. 388 00:40:26,920 --> 00:40:32,380 And sometimes you have. You have writers who really only write novels that you whose work you love, you want to publish. 389 00:40:32,380 --> 00:40:42,700 And and if they just don't write a novel that can be from which one part can be pulled out in a satisfying way, then you just you can't. 390 00:40:42,700 --> 00:40:48,760 Well, I'm thinking of this amazing moment in Ben Lerner's novel 03:50, where he talks about How do people know this novel? 391 00:40:48,760 --> 00:40:53,050 Some people, yes, where he talks about submitting a short story to The New Yorker. 392 00:40:53,050 --> 00:40:58,390 And do you want to narrate this? Or should I? Were you involved in it? Because you might want to narrate it if you were involved in it? 393 00:40:58,390 --> 00:41:04,270 Well, in the in the novel, he talks about submitting a short story to The New Yorker and the fiction editor asking him to make these changes. 394 00:41:04,270 --> 00:41:09,010 And he gets sort of uppity and refuses, and then his agent is like, 395 00:41:09,010 --> 00:41:13,450 You're turning down so much money and like writes to you guys and says, Well, sorry, he's a poet. 396 00:41:13,450 --> 00:41:19,390 He didn't know what he was. You know, the money had to do with the archives. But the so yeah, so he sent a story. 397 00:41:19,390 --> 00:41:27,120 And I think at that point, it was already maybe part of a novel in progress, which he didn't really mention. 398 00:41:27,120 --> 00:41:33,760 Or maybe it wasn't. Maybe it was just that was all he'd written. And I'm not his primary editor. 399 00:41:33,760 --> 00:41:40,090 My colleague, Chris Evolutionist is primary editor in chief. Circulated this piece and. 400 00:41:40,090 --> 00:41:49,960 And we really liked it, but it had this one section that was clearly about it was wasn't connected to the rest of the story, 401 00:41:49,960 --> 00:41:57,410 and Crestor was more forgiving about that than I was. She didn't bother her and I said, Well, really, can't we ask him to take that section out? 402 00:41:57,410 --> 00:42:03,130 And I think in retrospect, it was connecting to the rest of the novel and not to this particular segment. 403 00:42:03,130 --> 00:42:06,010 So, yeah, he did. He's absolutely not. I have my standards. 404 00:42:06,010 --> 00:42:12,400 I'm not going to be told what to do and I'm and went away and then a little while later came back sort of shamelessly saying, 405 00:42:12,400 --> 00:42:19,000 Well, all my friends say it's better without that. So OK. 406 00:42:19,000 --> 00:42:23,080 And then in his novel, he had that story, the golden vanity. 407 00:42:23,080 --> 00:42:28,750 And then he had a section about submitting it to The New Yorker being told, you know, and all his friends saying it was better without it. 408 00:42:28,750 --> 00:42:32,920 So it became some kind of meta fiction, but it was all true, right? 409 00:42:32,920 --> 00:42:39,670 Right. Oh, OK. That really wasn't even what I was going to ask you, but thank you for confirming that it was that it was all that it was all true. 410 00:42:39,670 --> 00:42:43,510 No, I was going to ask you. When you think about these, you know, 411 00:42:43,510 --> 00:42:50,110 excerpts from novels or where you think about how the short story can be unfolded into or constructed from the novel, 412 00:42:50,110 --> 00:42:54,100 you know, what do you think about the relationship between the kind of the kinds of short 413 00:42:54,100 --> 00:42:58,180 stories that you're publishing and the kinds of novels that people read? 414 00:42:58,180 --> 00:43:07,320 What is the relationship between the kind of New Yorker's taste in short stories and say the markets taste in novels? 415 00:43:07,320 --> 00:43:10,770 I'm thinking about it on the spot. I don't really know. 416 00:43:10,770 --> 00:43:16,080 I mean, on one level, I want to say that we work with the short story form because that's primarily what we work 417 00:43:16,080 --> 00:43:20,500 with and it's a different form from the novel and you can do different things with it. 418 00:43:20,500 --> 00:43:28,020 And because novels very rarely have these sort of compacted inner narratives that you can take out, 419 00:43:28,020 --> 00:43:33,510 it feels like quite a different style of writing most of the time that you can be more expansive. 420 00:43:33,510 --> 00:43:38,190 There's less pressure on a novel to do something in every paragraph, right? 421 00:43:38,190 --> 00:43:42,210 Whereas if you're writing three thousand words you read, you need to. 422 00:43:42,210 --> 00:43:49,260 It's more like a poem. You need to be doing something at all times. There's no sort of breather in there. 423 00:43:49,260 --> 00:43:57,300 So I don't I just think some writers are able to do one and not the other, and some writers are able to do both. 424 00:43:57,300 --> 00:44:02,160 Someone like, you know, Alice Munro, for instance, she said she used to say, 425 00:44:02,160 --> 00:44:07,860 I keep trying to write a novel and then it stops after 30 pages, you know, I just can't go on and write. 426 00:44:07,860 --> 00:44:10,620 And George Saunders struggled for years to to write something. 427 00:44:10,620 --> 00:44:15,930 He kept starting a novel and then it would come to me as a long story and he would give up on it. 428 00:44:15,930 --> 00:44:20,100 And so it took him a long time to come up with a novel form that he could work in. 429 00:44:20,100 --> 00:44:25,080 Yeah. How did you think about who to include in the 20 under 40 and why? 430 00:44:25,080 --> 00:44:33,720 40. Why the age for why the age 40? She asked. 431 00:44:33,720 --> 00:44:42,480 What? We have done a similar issue 10 years before which because we included two 40 year olds, we couldn't call 20 under 40. 432 00:44:42,480 --> 00:44:50,670 So I think we called it 20 writers for the new millennium because it was in 1999, but the oldest word to 40 year olds. 433 00:44:50,670 --> 00:44:54,570 Just as a way of looking at, you know, 434 00:44:54,570 --> 00:45:05,270 new developments in fiction and new voices in fiction and trying to take a quite self-conscious look at that and look at what's happening and. 435 00:45:05,270 --> 00:45:12,560 Yeah, I don't know. It's been there's maybe some pressure to do another one now that nine years have passed since the last one. 436 00:45:12,560 --> 00:45:19,190 And I I it makes me anxious because, you know, any time you try to judge based on early work, 437 00:45:19,190 --> 00:45:26,640 you're going to get some people wrong and some people write, or you're going to miss some people that basically when we does that make you anxious? 438 00:45:26,640 --> 00:45:31,300 Well, you don't want to you know, you've seen all the negative letters I get. OK. 439 00:45:31,300 --> 00:45:38,790 You know, and most people it it's it's an interesting process because it's a long process because 440 00:45:38,790 --> 00:45:45,180 we really try to read everything that that might be of interest by young writers. 441 00:45:45,180 --> 00:45:52,440 And some writers just take till later in their lives to really develop. 442 00:45:52,440 --> 00:45:56,970 And some some sort of have something fantastic when they're twenty two and then nothing. 443 00:45:56,970 --> 00:46:00,640 Right? So. 444 00:46:00,640 --> 00:46:07,300 Again, like I say, I try to focus on the story itself, and that's one case of not focussing on the story, that's a case of focussing on the writer. 445 00:46:07,300 --> 00:46:10,000 So it's it requires a sort of mind shift in my reading. 446 00:46:10,000 --> 00:46:15,330 Well, focussing on a collection or a curation of writers to write not just on the individual writer, but I'm reading something. 447 00:46:15,330 --> 00:46:19,210 We weren't really thinking of it in that way and one one way. 448 00:46:19,210 --> 00:46:26,020 One thing that affected the final selection was that we had to publish a story by that person so that at the time that we were, 449 00:46:26,020 --> 00:46:34,570 you know, say we had an ideal list of 30 people. If there were 10 on there who didn't have any story at that time, we couldn't really include them. 450 00:46:34,570 --> 00:46:38,320 And it was there was no honourable mention it. So it wasn't a competition in that sense. 451 00:46:38,320 --> 00:46:45,760 Right. So there were some people who did have stories and some who didn't, and it made a difference.