Listener supported WNYC Studios.

This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and the New Yorker.

This is the New Yorker Radio Hour.

I'm David Remnick.

In February, just a couple of weeks from now,

the New Yorker will mark its centenary,

100 years of publishing.

And yet, when we began,

the New Yorker's founding editor, Harold Ross,

saw the magazine almost purely as what he called a comic paper.

Those first issues were light as air.

But once Ross made the crucial hire of Catherine White, an editor who insisted on bringing the best of fiction and poetry to the magazine, things changed.

And over a century's worth of issues, we've published an immense body of short fiction and poems. I mean, the New Yorker is published in its history

close to 14,000 pieces of fiction. So you went back and read every single one. And how many poems

do we have any idea, Kevin? I think you might eclipse us.

I think we're at 13,500 or something I thought.

Deborah Treasman and Kevin Young have just put together two anthologies to celebrate the New Yorker Centennial.

Deborah has been the magazine's fiction editor and my colleague since 2003,

and she's just edited A Century of Fiction at The New Yorker. Kevin joined us as poetry editor

in 2017. He's an amazing poet and the director of the Smithsonian's National Museum of African

American History and Culture. And in his spare time, he's edited the new book, A Century of Poetry

at the New Yorker.

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