Cressida Leyshon
It’s hard to imagine New Yorker fiction without the contributions of the many Irish writers who have been published in the magazine, but the first notable Irish story didn’t appear until 1945, two decades after the magazine’s founding. That was Frank O’Connor’s News for the Church, which is set chiefly in a confessional in Ballygrogan, Co Cork.
A couple of years earlier, as the scholar Ben Fried has noted, one of the magazine’s fiction editors, William Maxwell, rejected a story from a Tennessee-born writer with the somewhat rueful observation: “The story belongs to a world that is essentially remote from New York City. The editors have in their minds an imaginary map of Manhattan which includes, strangely, all of Connecticut and Long Island, Florida, New Jersey, Hollywood, and wherever New Yorkers go.”
[ Maeve Brennan, a writer who was at home in neither Ireland nor AmericaOpens in new window ]
Ballygrogan may be even more remote from that imaginary place than the southern states of the US, but this story about a priest who finds himself wishing to crush the ebullience of a 19-year-old woman who has cheerfully confessed to lying, drinking and carnal intercourse, was certainly sophisticated enough for a New Yorker reader, displaying O’Connor’s sly humour, astute understanding of psychology, and unerring ear for voice.
It came at a time when the notion of what constituted a “New Yorker story” was starting to broaden and deepen, and O’Connor’s stories – he published 45 in the magazine’s pages – and those of the other Irish writers who joined him, such as Maeve Brennan, Mary Lavin, Edna O’Brien and Brian Friel, were instrumental in making the magazine’s fiction seem less parochial.
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It wasn’t just a question of geographical diversity. All these authors could chart the course of emotions we sometimes struggle to understand. William Trevor published nearly four dozen stories in the magazine before his death in 2016, teasing out the moral complexities of his characters’ often provincial lives. In recent years, Roddy Doyle, Anne Enright, Colm Tóibín, Kevin Barry, Colin Barrett, Claire Keegan and Sally Rooney make up just a partial list of the Irish writers who have found a home in the New Yorker.
Cressida Leyshon is deputy fiction editor of the New Yorker
Belinda McKeon
September 2005 was, for us, a month of firsts. First month in our new city. First apartment together. First time being cautioned by a cop on the subway, for going through the turnstile with a table we’d found on the street (he let us off once he heard our accents). First encounters with people who are still our friends, and still the people I go to when I need first readers, 20 years later. And also: the arrival, into the skinny metal mailbox of our Bushwick apartment building, of our first New Yorker. The cover image was another kind of first. A fortnight after Katrina, Ana Juan’s Requiem showed a ghostly black saxophonist serenading a section of iron-lace porches and street signs, sunk into the floodwaters of New Orleans. The brushwork made the paper cover of the magazine itself look water-damaged. It was the first time of many that I would take up the new issue and catch my breath, at once marvelling and shuddering at this country that I had decided to call home. The last would be in June 2022, a couple of weeks before we moved back to Ireland, when Eric Drooker’s cover illustration of a chalkboard depicting crime scene body outlines was titled simply Uvalde. I looked at our two small kids and knew our decision was the right one, painful though it was.
[ In praise of Mary Lavin, by Belinda McKeonOpens in new window ]
But it was what was inside the cover, obviously, that changed me, during those years as a New Yorker. Shaped me. There, I found not just the fiction writers who’d become so important to me as I started to build a canon beyond my Irish prototype, but the journalists whose way with the facts, and the deep context, taught me even more about storytelling. When an Irish short story or poem showed up in the mix, I’d either smirk with pride or simmer with envy. Maybe the balance between the two wasn’t that even. But that’s the New Yorker: always showing you what you’re not sure you want to know.
Anne Enright
In October 1999 I met the then fiction editor of the New Yorker, Bill Buford, in, I think, the Dublin Theatre Festival bar where he had rocked up after judging The Irish Times fiction awards. I aired some large opinions about the shortlist, which included Lorrie Moore and Alice Munro whose work I adored, but I got a bit cross when he asked me to repeat my name (I refused – the man was clearly drunk). This palaver continued in a friend’s car, as she dropped him back to his hotel, and we had to stop to extract a huge, pink, tasselled lampshade that had become trapped between the undercarriage and the road. Afterwards, I would have been happy to live on the anecdote, but a more canny literary operator told me to send Buford my collection of short stories and to tell him my goddamn name. So I did, and he got in touch.
This all may sound a little raucous, but it was still pre-internet and that collection, The Portable Virgin, had barely been reviewed. It was also a time when being Irish was no guarantee of literary cachet – perhaps the opposite was true. In London, some years before, a publisher was going from our meeting to a New Yorker party and, when I brightly suggested I might tag along, he looked me up and down and said: “Maybe when you get some better clothes.”
But, in the spring of 2000, I was queuing for a flight to JFK, with the proofs for my first New Yorker story in my bag. Seamus Heaney walked by and said hello, and I knew that days did not get any better than this. Adding to my sense of achievement and arrival was the fact that I was pregnant with my first child.
Publishing in the New Yorker remains a thrill, every time. Working with Deborah Treisman, I have come to love the rigour of the editing process. The best query I have had from their infamous fact checkers was about my 2017 story Solstice, which suggested I had the position of the entire planet wrong (now that’s what I call a fact).
There is a 10-year gap, 2007-2017, when I did not write short stories. I was busy writing novels and suspected the noise of publishing them robbed me of some sense of creative privacy, which the short story needs. I think of it as a vulnerable, trusting form and find it remarkable that a major publication like the New Yorker can afford that feeling of a personal or local space. I am also grateful for the way that Deborah Treisman will stand by a writer, over time. What happened in that gap, I now realise, was a deeper, personal shift. My recent stories Solstice, Nightswim and The Bridge Stood Fast have considered what it is to be a parent. These are slow truths. The next story is always waiting for me; it just takes me a while to reach it.
Colin Barrett
About 17 years ago I finished my first story. My first “proper” story. It’s properness lay mostly in the fact of it being finished; it was thin piece, a memoiristically thin slice of life too thinly sliced, but still. There were some good sentences in there. Okay ones, at any rate. I wanted to be a writer.
I wondered where to send it. This was the late 2000s, and with all the impunity of a complete unknown with zero track record I thought, why not aim for the top? I checked the New Yorker website and yes, there was a submissions email. Anyone, apparently, could send in a piece of work, and someone would read it. Why not? I thought. I wasn’t doing anything illegal, so far as I knew. Impertinent maybe, creating a chore for the intern or junior editor or whoever it was that would eventually encounter my story as they sifted through the slush pile, but isn’t that why it was called the slush pile? Whatever the story was, it was at least slush.
The guidelines advised there was a response time of “up to six months”. And, sure enough, six months to the day I received a response. In the interim I remained impeccably unpublished. I had been working in a call centre for several years at that point, and was occasionally conducting interviews on behalf of the company. I knew enough about the protocols of any selection process to know that responses that landed just inside the limit of the allotted response time was a bad sign; successful candidates get told they are successful quickly. Everyone else gets told punctually.
I opened the mail and sure enough, it was a no. The response was polite, succinct, unattackably measured.
Years later I did get published by the New Yorker. As someone who loves the short story form, seeing my work appear in that magazine has been one of the highs of my writing life. Still, it’s funny what sticks with you. It’s a truism that all writers feel more decisively formed by the multitude of nos they receive on the way to the occasional yeses that comprise a writing life. The thing is, that rejection from the New Yorker was my first official one. It wasn’t important that it was a rejection, it was important that it was official, in the sense that contact had been made. Not just with the New Yorker I mean, but with the writing life I wanted, the life which, with that polite, perfunctory no, had in many ways finally begun.
Roddy Doyle
Years ago, before Google Maps – before Google most things – I got a phone call from one of the New Yorker’s famous fact-checkers. A story I’d written, called Recuperation, was going into the magazine and this call was a step in the editorial process. Did I know, the fact-checker asked me, that I’d got the name of the road at the beginning of the story wrong?
Recuperation starts with a man standing at the Artane Roundabout, in north Dublin, at the junction of Malahide Road and Ardlea Road. But I’d called it Ardlea Avenue. I’d got the name wrong, even though I’d been living a couple of hundred yards from the Artane roundabout for 14 years. The fact-checker, a man who’d never been to Dublin, had discovered my error by going down to New York Public Library and looking at a map. I, the author, the laureate of the Northside, hadn’t even bothered to walk to the end of the road to look at the street sign. I could have bought the milk and eggs on the way home.
The fact checking is just one door a story has to go through before the writer gets to see it in the New Yorker. The last few days before the magazine goes to print are particularly exhilarating; waking up to a final set of editorial queries, sent late from New York the night before, or a JPEG of the illustration that will accompany the story. It’s nerve-racking and wonderful. The story is invariably better and sharper after it’s been through the New Yorker doors. It will also be geographically bang-on.
A Century of The New Yorker’s Irish Writers with Anne Enright, Roddy Doyle and Colin Barrett and The New Yorker’s Deborah Treisman and Cressida Leyshon in conversation with Belinda McKeon takes place at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, on Sunday, October 12th
Stories by Irish fiction writers in The New Yorker
*Includes some novel excerpts
Number of stories published to date by deceased authors:
- William Trevor (1977–2007): 46
- Edna O’Brien (1962–2009): 45
- Frank O’Connor (1945–67, inc 2 posthumous): 45
- Maeve Brennan (1952–73): 39
- Benedict Kiely (1958–1976): 17
- Mary Lavin (1959–76): 15
- Brian Friel (1959–1965): 13
- John McGahern (1963–84): 6
- Joyce Cary (1953–57): 6
- Walter Macken (1954–63): 5
- Julia O’Faolain (1957 and 1994): 3
- Samuel Beckett (1981-83, and 1 posthumous 1996): 3
- Seamus Deane (1995): 1
Number of stories published to date by living authors:
- Roddy Doyle (1996–2024): 14
- Anne Enright (2000–2025, inc 2 flash): 10
- Joseph O’Neill (2014–2025): 9
- Kevin Barry (2010–24): 6
- Colm Tóibín (2007–2025): 5
- Colin Barrett (2015–2021, inc 1 flash): 5
- Sally Rooney (2019–2024): 3
- Danielle McLaughlin (2014–2015): 2
- Colum McCann (1999–2012): 2
- Claire Keegan (2010–2022): 2
- Martin Roper (2001): 1
- Bernard MacLaverty (2006): 1
- Mary Costello (2023): 1
- Keith Ridgway (2011): 1
