The New Yorker: A Century of Fiction

·1 hr·4 clips

A book critic laughs at a bank robber's use of the word 'capisce' — and gets shot in the head for it.

1. Selected Shorts presents a New Yorker centenary special, featuring four stories from the anthology 'A Century of Fiction in The New Yorker,' hosted by Meg Wolitzer and guest-hosted by fiction editor Deborah Treisman. 2. Deborah Treisman, The New Yorker's fiction editor, spent almost a year reading for the anthology and opens the evening from the Symphony Space stage, noting she could have included 10 stories for every one she chose. 3. The episode's organizing principle is tracking how the New Yorker's fiction evolved from comic sketches in 1925 to explorations of 'lives, ideas, and language in ever-changing ways' across a century. 4. E.B. White's 'Life Cycle of a Literary Genius' (1926), performed by Liev Schreiber, traces a writer's career in six numbered steps: a childhood poem praised by his mother, a newspaper sonnet rewritten by a columnist, an article published 16 years late when the locusts returned, and a fatal lunch with an editor who offered him a staff position. 5. The sketch closes with the writer dying 'of nervous indigestion right after lunch,' leaving an illegitimate son who grows up in obscurity and 'writes the great American novel' — a two-minute piece that Meg Wolitzer calls an 'amuse-bouche.' 6. William Maxwell's 'Love,' performed by Fred Hechinger, describes a fifth-grade class's collective devotion to their teacher Miss Vera Brown, 'who reminded the narrator of pansies' and 'never had to ask us to be quiet or stop throwing erasers.' 7. The class presents Miss Brown with sweet peas from the greenhouse on her birthday, pays for her ticket to see D.W. Griffith's 'Hearts of the World,' and plans to take her with them through every grade — 'we meant to have her for our teacher forever.' 8. When Miss Brown disappears for months, two boys ride their bikes to a farmhouse to find her propped up on pillows in a double bed with 'arms like sticks,' eyes enormous; she doesn't seem glad to see them and 'belonged to her illness.' 9. The narrator later reads in the Lincoln Evening Courier that 'Miss Vera Brown, who taught the fifth grade in Central School, had died of tuberculosis, aged 23 years and seven months.' 10. Tobias Wolff's 'Bullet in the Brain,' performed by Liev Schreiber, follows Anders, 'a book critic known for the weary, elegant savagery with which he dispatched almost everything he reviewed,' trapped in a bank robbery, unable to contain his sardonic commentary. 11. When a gunman forces Anders to stare at the ceiling, Anders notices a badly painted fresco of Zeus and Europa in which 'if there'd been a bubble coming out of his mouth, it would have said, hubba hubba' — and bursts out laughing when the robber says 'Capisce?' 12. The bullet enters Anders' brain and the story shifts to 'brain time,' during which Anders has 'plenty of leisure' to contemplate his final memory — and Wolff catalogs at length what Anders did NOT remember: his first lover, his wife, his daughter, hundreds of memorized poems, his own capacity for joy. 13. What Anders did remember: a summer afternoon, yellow grass, a pickup baseball game, and Coyle's cousin from Mississippi saying 'short's the best position they is' — a sentence Anders had desperately wanted to hear again. 14. The story closes by repeating 'They is. They is. They is.' as the bullet completes its path — Wolff's argument that what survives memory is not what we think should matter. 15. Yiyun Li's 'All Will Be Well,' performed by Ann Harada, is narrated by a literature professor who becomes a regular at a salon run by Lily, a Vietnamese-Chinese immigrant whose conversational style is described as that of 'a verbal magician.' 16. Lily tells the narrator about her first love, Tuan, a Vietnamese boy she met at 16 who begged to leave Vietnam with her family when the 1979 China-Vietnam war broke out; her father refused, saying 'you're not our son, you're your parents' son.' 17. After 40 years, friends put Lily in contact with Tuan, now married with three daughters and living in Vietnam; when Lily finally calls, Tuan cannot speak and sobs throughout the call. 18. Tuan's daughter takes the phone, tells Lily she is 'part of our family,' and reveals that all three daughters' names contain the Chinese character from Lily's name — the character for 'Blossom' — a detail that makes the narrator 'shudder the way one shudders when stepping out into an abandoned tunnel.' 19. The story ends (in the truncated transcript) with Tuan's daughter asking if Lily would like to speak to his wife, who is waiting to talk. 20. The episode was recorded live at Symphony Space in New York City with performances by Liev Schreiber, Fred Hechinger, and Ann Harada; Deborah Treisman and Meg Wolitzer provide editorial framing between stories.

As heard by us

A polished centennial tribute that keeps the fiction front and center.

The hour treats The New Yorker at 100 as both archive and living magazine, returning to Harold Ross's 1925 idea of wit, reporting, fiction, art, and criticism while also nodding to the writers who have passed through its pages.

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Press play for a New Yorker centennial celebration of short fiction, read aloud with poise.

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