SOURCE: "Storyville," in The New Yorker, Vol. LXX, No. 19, June 27-July 4, 1994, pp. 104-09.

Angell is an American author who has written several books about baseball and was the fiction editor of the New Yorker from 1956 to 1994. In the following essay, he reflects on the criteria for accepting works of fiction submitted to the New Yorker.

Do anything long enough, and you hang up a record. Just go to bed every night, and before you know it you've passed Sleeping Beauty. Set down the dog's dinner, day by day, and pretty soon he's put away enough Alpo to feed the Dallas Cowboys on Thanksgiving. "Hey," said a colleague of mine, sticking his head in my office door the other day. "Did you know that you've rejected fifteen thousand stories here? I just figured it out. Fifteen thousand, easy."

Well, thanks. I got out a pencil and did some figuring...