Short stories and poems from The New Yorker.
Updated: 49 min 45 sec ago
Mon, 08/30/2010 - 04:00
We are at or near that approximate line
where a stiff breeze becomes
or lapses from a considerable wind,
and I like it here, the chimney smokes
right-angled from west to east but still
for brief intact stretches
the plush animal tails of their fires.
I like how the . . .
Mon, 08/30/2010 - 04:00
Theirs was the second-to-last house on the road. The road ended in an asphalt circle called a cul-de-sac, and beyond the cul-de-sac was a field of corn. That field had startled Amina when she first arrived—had made her wonder, just for a . . .
Mon, 08/30/2010 - 04:00
He’d become a house guest, noncommittal
and impassive. She tried to see to it
he wasn’t disturbed, nothing to trip him up:
a book, perhaps, laid down
in some rash motion might scare him
off an edge, although he had a talent, it seemed,
for focussing . . .
Mon, 08/23/2010 - 04:00
At lunch, Zichen told her two co workers that she was considering going to a new place for her vacation. Feeling more adventurous this year? Ted said. Since Zichen had begun to work with Henry and Ted, thirteen years earlier, she had taken two weeks off every November to visit . . .
Mon, 08/23/2010 - 04:00
I said, “Do you speak-a my language?”He just smiled and gave me a Vegemite sandwich. —“Down Under.”
We middle-aged sense them immediately:
four brittle pop stars sprawled across
the rigid fibreglass chairs at the airport gate.
It’s not just that . . .
Mon, 08/23/2010 - 04:00
O Sting, where is thy death . . .
Mon, 08/09/2010 - 04:00
p align=justify>The straightforward mermaid starts every sentence with “Look . . . ” This comes from being raised in a sea full of hooks. She wants to get points 1, 2, and 3 across, doesn’t want to disappear like a river into the ocean. When she’s . . .
Mon, 08/09/2010 - 04:00
My parents, with admirable foresight, had their first child while they were on fellowships in the United States. My mother was in public health, and my father in a library-science program. Having an American baby was, my mother once said, like putting money in the bank. They lived near . . .
Mon, 08/09/2010 - 04:00
p align=right>Many terribly quiet customers exist but none more
terribly quiet than Man:
his footsteps pass so perilously soft across the sea
in marble winter,
up the stiff blue waves and every . . .
Mon, 08/02/2010 - 04:00
Home is a place we never notice
Needing much repair, and coming back
Year after year, the separated man
Filled the cracks in the hardwood floors with his own dust.
The house no longer creaked, or he no longer heard it;
The walls were painted but not covered;
Tiles of . . .
Mon, 08/02/2010 - 04:00
At twenty, you hold this street’s attention
better than the Bolshoi could—
the boots, the perfume, not to mention
the bling and ermine on your hood.
The way you walk is slash and burn.
Like understatement’s now a crime.
You leave a wake of men . . .
Mon, 08/02/2010 - 04:00
In the spring of 1976, before the start of their affair, before he became her husband, before she knew anything about him, Polina had noticed Alec in one or another of the V.E.F. buildings, always looking vaguely, childishly amused.
“If my Papatchka ran the factory, maybe I’d . . .
Mon, 08/02/2010 - 04:00
We want this.
The end to sleeping, the bittersweet
arousal, the peeling back, the soft bath
in resin, the release. It can’t come quick
enough, the hot touch that breaks the crust
and lets us go. Hear it now: a crackling,
as the woods begin to sing alongside . . .
Mon, 07/26/2010 - 04:00
By the time the boy climbs out of bed and goes outside, they are already searching for the Frenchman, a guest of the hotel, whose clothing has been spotted adrift in the kelp-logged surf by one of the local fishermen. The morning is hot and bright, and Jack stands . . .
Mon, 07/26/2010 - 04:00
It’s just me throwing myself at you,
romance as usual, us times us,
not lust but moxibustion,
a substance burning close
to the body as possible
without risk of immolation.
Nearness without contact
causes numbness. Analgesia.
Pins and needles. As the snugness
of the surgeon’s glove . . .
Fri, 07/23/2010 - 04:00
Téa Obreht was featured in The New Yorker’s 20 Under 40 Fiction Issue. Her story will appear later in the summer.
When were you born?
September 30, 1985.
Where?
Belgrade . . .
Mon, 07/19/2010 - 04:00
The dredgeman had a name, Louis Thanksgiving Auschenbliss, but lately he preferred to think of himself as a profession. For the past six months, he’d spent each day and half the night pushing farther into the alien interior of the Florida swamp, elbow to elbow with twelve other . . .
Mon, 07/19/2010 - 04:00
With one he wrote a number so beautiful
it lasted forever in the legends of numbers. With another
he described the martyrs’ feet as they marched
past the weeping stones and cypresses, watched
by their fathers. He used one as a silver wand to lift
a trout from its . . .
Mon, 07/19/2010 - 04:00
We weren’t speaking. It was snowing, temps dipping
into the teens. You and I were playing Frisbee
because we’d fought all day, and it’s a tonic
to get outside and throw the sharp disk at one another
with cold dumb hands. Then the animals . . .
Mon, 07/19/2010 - 04:00
Karen Russell was featured in The New Yorker’s 20 Under 40 Fiction Issue. Her story will appear later in the summer.
When were you born?
July 10, 1981.
Where?
Miami, Florida.
