Roger Angel anoints Donald Barthelme as the reigning fiction- meister of The new Yorker in the late sixties and American literature swerves toward a surreal, soulful preciousness. Risk-taking abounds. In 1980 The New Yorker swerves again, more like a stylistic spin-out when Gordon Lish edits Raymond Carver setting off a stampede of literary After forty five years with the New Yorker beginning with Updike's Pigeon Feather's pieces in the early sixties, I'm leaning toward the Texas Monthly.