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

Listen and subscribe: Apple | Spotify | Google | Wherever You Listen

Sign up for our daily newsletter to get the best of The New Yorker in your in-box.

David Remnick talks with The New Yorker’s literary guiding lights: the fiction editor Deborah Treisman and the poetry editor Kevin Young. Treisman edited “A Century of Fiction in The New Yorker,” and Young edited “A Century of Poetry in The New Yorker,” both of which were published this month. “When you asked me to do this, I think my first response was ‘I’ve only wanted to do this since I was fifteen,’ ” Young tells Remnick. “It was kind of a dream come true.” Treisman talks about the way that stories age, and the difficulty of selecting pieces: “The thing to remember is that even geniuses don’t always write their best work right off the bat. People make a lot of noise about rejection letters from The New Yorker that went to famous writers, or later-famous writers—and they were probably justified, those rejections.”

New episodes of The New Yorker Radio Hour drop every Tuesday and Friday. Follow the show wherever you get your podcasts.

The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.