What The New Yorker Was Reading in 1925

Whatever Newman’s theory might be, it remains indiscernible to a reader being hustled through her incantatory anthology’s vacuum of critical pronouncement. If the short story began, as Newman posits, with men’s “fondness for recounting their amorous conquests,” that “would account for its beginning in the egotistical first person; and fraternal exultation, rather than physiognomical improbability, would explain its passage to the altruistic third person.” It might even explain why the sixteen selections include not a single one by a woman, though Newman, a librarian from Georgia, would soon publish two novels herself.