Deborah Treisman

At 32, Treisman was the youngest person to be the esteemed magazine's Fiction Editor and only the second woman to do so since Katherine Sergeant Angell White was at the post from the magazine's inception in 1925 to 1960.

Prior to her tenure as Fiction Editor, The New York Times reported that The New Yorker published more male than female fiction writers.

There was speculation at the time that Treisman might push the section to publish not only more women but also experimental and international writers.

In an interview at the time, Treisman maintained a neutral stance, "We are not short on great work, but why not have variety and why not have the best? With 52 stories a year, we have that kind of flexibility."

Deborah Treisman (born 1970) is the Fiction Editor for The New Yorker.

Treisman also hosts craft conversations with The New Yorker short fiction contributors discussing their favorite stories from the magazine's archives in the Fiction podcast, and authors reading their own recently-published work in The Writer's Voice podcast.

Treisman was born in Oxford, England and spent her first years in England.

She grew up in a family of scholars.

Her mother was the noted cognitive psychologist Anne Treisman.

Her stepfather, Daniel Kahneman, won a Nobel prize in economic science.

When Treisman was eight, her family relocated to Vancouver, British Columbia.

Treisman submitted her own writing to The New Yorker at the age of 11.

Her submission was rejected.

She began her studies at the University of California at Berkeley at the age of 16 and went on to earn her degree in Comparative Literature.

She was hired by Buford and served as his Deputy Fiction Editor from 1997–2003.

In 2003, Treisman took the helm of the magazine's Fiction section after then-Fiction Editor Bill Buford transitioned to other staff work and writing projects of his own.

In 2005, the magazine centered their annual Fiction issue on stories of international writers, highlighting such voices as Chile's Roberto Bolaño and Japan's Yōko Ogawa.

The show released a few trial episodes in early 2007 and the show officially debuted later that year in October.

The episodes are about an hour in length and the subject matter is occasionally for a mature audience.

At the Hot Docs Podcast Festival in Toronto in November 2024, the show did a live episode where Margaret Atwood read Varieties of Exile by Mavis Gallant.

Sarah Bannan praised the show in The Irish Times saying "the writers are superb. So too are the stories."

While data on the gender of authors published at The New Yorker only stretches back to 2010, the nonprofit organization VIDA: Women in Literary Arts reports that at that time, only 26.7% of the magazine's authors were women.

One story, "Cat Person," published in a December 2017 issue of The New Yorker, follows disturbing developments in a relationship between a 20-year old woman and an older man.

The story, written by Kristen Roupenian, sparked an unprecedented readership for a fictional story (an estimated 2 million readers) and heated discussions on social media about consent, gender, and power.

The large readership is attributed by some to the story's publication at the height of the #MeToo movement.

In 2017, Bloomsbury USA published The Dream Colony: A Life in Art, a book Treisman co-authored with the artist Walter Hopps and Anne Doran.

The Dream Colony is a memoir and visual catalogue of Hopps' life as a curator of art in the second half of the 20th century.

In his early twenties, Hopps founded the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles, which spotlighted West Coast artists.

He went on to curate collections at such galleries and institutions as the Pasadena Art Museum (now the Norton Simon Museum of Art), the Washington Gallery of Fine Art, and the Corcoran Gallery of Art.

In an interview with Scroll.in in early 2018, Treisman described her response and decision to publish the story: "It was an intense read and maybe uncomfortable. My first instinct might have been to say no for that reason but it was actually the best reason to say yes. So I decided to take it."

Prior to her work at The New Yorker, Treisman was the managing editor at Grand Street and worked on the editorial staff of The New York Review of Books, Harper's Magazine, and The Threepenny Review.

The New Yorker: Fiction is a podcast hosted by Treisman and produced by The New Yorker.

In each episode a writer is invited onto the show to read one of their favorite short stories from The New Yorker 's archive.

The reading is then followed by a discussion with the host.

In each episode a guest reads a short story from the archive of The New Yorker followed by a discussion between the guest and Treisman.

The podcast is able to consistently have well know writers on the show because The New Yorker has continued to publish short stories for such a long time.

The show has featured guests such as David Sedaris, Ben Marcus, and Salman Rushdie.

The show releases episodes on a monthly basis.

In its most recent report in 2019, VIDA showed that 45.0% of The New Yorker contributors were women, 54.9% were men, and .1% of contributors were gender nonbinary.

The show was nominated for a Webby Award in 2020.