Listen and subscribe: Apple | Spotify | Google | Wherever You Listen Sign up to receive our weekly Books & Fiction newsletter. Joy Williams reads her story “The Beach House,” from the January 15, 2024, issue of the magazine. Williams, a winner of the Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction, is the author of … Read more
Listen and subscribe: Apple | Spotify | Google | Wherever You Listen Sign up to receive our weekly Books & Fiction newsletter. On a special, archival New Year’s episode, Greg Jackson reads his story “Wagner in the Desert,” from the July 21, 2014, issue of the magazine, in which a group of old friends convene … Read more
According to the author Justin Torres, “backstory and exposition are tricks of the adult mind.” That explains why his first novel, “We the Animals,” which is told from the shared perspective of three young brothers in upstate New York, unfolds not as a narrative but as a string of vignettes. The semi-autobiographical novel describes a … Read more
In “Crown Heights North,” your story in this week’s issue, a dead man downloads a running app—that’s the setup, both simple and deeply complicated. The man was in his mid-fifties when he died, and he now finds himself in an afterlife that bears a strong resemblance to the world he knew prior to his death. … Read more
Listen and subscribe: Apple | Spotify | Google | Wherever You Listen Sign up to receive our weekly Books & Fiction newsletter. Rivka Galchen reads her story “Crown Heights North,” from the January 1 & 8, 2024, issue of the magazine. Galchen is the author of three books of fiction, including the story collection “American … Read more
For thousands of years, a breed of white, woolly dog played an important and cultural role for Coast Salish people in Western Canada but when colonists moved in the animal quickly became extinct, a new study says. It started with a dog named Mutton that died in 1859. Its pelt had been in a collection at the … Read more
Cost of Living8:55The return of the bookstore When e-readers like the Amazon Kindle burst onto the scene, showing up next to menorahs and under Christmas trees in the early 2000s, they were predicted to bring about the death of the print book — and maybe the independent bookstore too. But publishing sales data and on the … Read more
“Incoming” is a collection of short pieces, written separately, which we assembled with the idea that they were thematically linked and would resonate together. Can you tell me what prompted you to write them, and over what period of time? For many years now, I’ve been trying to understand what constitutes a “story” (as distinct … Read more
The narrator of your story “The Good Denis” (which was translated, from the French, by Jordan Stump) learns from her aging mother, who may have dementia, that as a young child she was cared for by a man she has never heard of, whose goodness was unrivalled. How did this premise come to you? It’s … Read more
In “Keats at Twenty-four,” your story in this week’s issue of The New Yorker, a nameless middle-aged writer seems to have come to something of a halt. Let’s start with the title. You quote a line from Robert Lowell: “Every writer, every journeyman, / past the halfway, is Keats at twenty-four.” How do these lines … Read more
