In 2007 and 2008, Frank Kovarik, who writes and teaches English in St. Louis, sent us a spreadsheet that he has used to catalog New Yorker fiction since 2003, and now, with another year of data included, we’re going to revisit it.
Frank’s spreadsheet records not just the titles and authors of the stories published in the New Yorker, but things like gender, country of origin, and frequency of appearance. He also includes his own personal quality rating for each story (your mileage may vary; he writes about his favorites here).
Frank has once again generously offered to make his spreadsheet available to Millions readers. If you’re interested, you can see it here.
With seven years of data compiled, we can get some hard info on the New Yorker’s tendencies when publishing fiction.
Frequency:
The first thing we always look at is if the New Yorker is bringing new writers into the mix or sticking with its old standbys. Just 10 writers account for 82 (or 23%) of the 358 stories to appear over the last seven years. Just 18 writers account for 124 (or 35%) of the stories. The New Yorker is sometimes criticized for featuring the same writers again and again, but it appears to be getting better on this front. The 18 “standbys” noted above and listed below accounted for only 7 of the 49 stories published in 2009 (or 14%). On the flip side of this argument, 15 writers appeared in the New Yorker for the first time in 2009 (at least since 2003).
Gender:
Of the 358 stories in the New Yorker from 2003 through 2009, 131 or 36.6% were penned by women. (That’s down from 38.1% last year.)
Nationality:
The fiction section of the New Yorker is a pretty multi-cultural place, but Americans still make up the bulk of the contributors. 184 of the stories, or 51% (up from 50% after 2008), are American (and this leaves off several writers who could be conceivably classified as both American and a native of another country). Coming in in second are the Brits at 29 stories and in third the Irish at 23 stories.
Returning to the frequency question, below are all the writers who have appeared in the New Yorker at least five times over the last six years. These are the superstars of New Yorker fiction (stars indicate the number of stories, if any, they had in the New Yorker in 2009.):
12:
- Alice Munro
10:
- Tessa Hadley**
- William Trevor
8:
- T. Coraghessan Boyle
7:
- George Saunders**
- Jonathan Lethem**
- Louise Erdrich
- John Updike
- Roddy Doyle
- Haruki Murakami
6:
- Antonya Nelson*
- Thomas McGuane
5:
- Tobias Wolff
- Charles D’Ambrosio
- Edward P. Jones
- Roberto Bolaño
- Lara Vapnyar
