The Recipe for "Sheer Dessert" - Woody Allen's Short Stories for The New Yorker

This paper explores the relationship between Woody Allen's short fiction and the immediate literary context represented by the tradition of The New Yorker, the magazine where he published most of his texts and which exerted considerable influence on an entire class of twentieth-century American writers. A closer look into what makes this high degree of compatibility between Allen's short fiction and what came to be referred to as 'The New Yorker short story' provides valuable insight into the dominant aesthetic coordinates of the literary tradition cultivated by the magazine, as well as into the universe of Woody Allen's short fiction.