New Yorker Fiction

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Short stories and poems from The New Yorker.
Updated: 35 weeks 5 days ago

Tessa Hadley: “Clever Girl.”

Mon, 05/30/2011 - 04:00
My stepfather wasn’t a big man, not much taller than my mother. He was lithe and light on his feet, handsome, with velvety dark brows, a sensual mouth, and jet-black hair in a crewcut as thick and soft as the pelt of an animal (not that I . . . (Subscription required.)

Franz Wright: “Recurring Awakening.”

Mon, 05/30/2011 - 04:00
I stop a tall girl all in blue on the hall and receive first a harried and desultory apology then, point blank, news that you passed late last night. You passed at three-thirty in the morning. What is it, some sort of exam? She smiles at herself, epicenter of . . . (Subscription required.)

Dan Chiasson: “The Boy in the Egyptian Wing.”

Mon, 05/30/2011 - 04:00
The boy in the Egyptian wing Wanted one thing: For his father To lift him over The glass case Where the Sarcophagus For a century Lay empty, The bones and treasures Sold to collectors, And to pretend Again and again To lower him in . . . (Subscription required.)

Yusef Komunyakaa: “The Circus.”

Mon, 05/23/2011 - 04:00
A war’s going on somewhere, but tonight a forest glows beneath the big top, calling for the sword-swallower & contortionist, the beautiful high-wire walker who almost dies nightly, the fire-eater, the lion-tamer, the believer in sage & sleeping salts who wears a money belt . . . (Subscription required.)

Kate Walbert: “M&M World.”

Mon, 05/23/2011 - 04:00
Ginny had promised to take the girls to M&M World, that ridiculous place in Times Square they had passed too often in a taxi, Maggie scooting to press her face to the glass to watch the giant smiling M&M scale the Empire State Building on the . . .

J. T. Barbarese: “There and Not There.”

Mon, 05/23/2011 - 04:00
A meditation on the question “Was it all worth it” his memoir recounts his finding himself suddenly “coming to” as if from a coma in the middle of a banquet and the recognition that age had advanced on him glacially. Then the gash down the plane . . . (Subscription required.)

Ron Rash: “The Trusty.”

Mon, 05/16/2011 - 04:00
They had been moving up the road a week without seeing another farmhouse, and the nearest well, at least the nearest the owner would let Sinkler use, was half a mile back. What had been a trusty sluff job was now as onerous as swinging a kaiser blade or shovelling . . . (Subscription required.)

Rodney Jones: “Starstruck.”

Mon, 05/16/2011 - 04:00
First came Bob (Just Bob), a visiting cousin’s second husband, the operator of Lyndon Johnson’s teleprompter; then Archie Persons, Truman Capote’s biological father, jitterbugging in the parlor at my eighth-grade English teacher’s Christmas party. Then more flagrant examples: chance sightings of . . . (Subscription required.)

Jane Hirshfield: “In Daylight, I Turned on the Lights.”

Mon, 05/16/2011 - 04:00
In daylight, I turned on the lights, in darkness, I pulled closed the curtains. And the god of More, whom nothing surprises, softly agreed— each day, year after year, the dead were dead one day more completely. In the places where morels were found, I looked for morels. In . . . (Subscription required.)

W. S. Merwin: “Turning.”

Mon, 05/09/2011 - 04:00
Going too fast for myself I missed more than I think I can remember almost everything it seems sometimes and yet there are chances that come back that I did not notice when they stood where I could have reached out and touched them this morning the black shepherd dog . . . (Subscription required.)

Tess Gallagher: “The Tallest Men in Europe.”

Mon, 05/09/2011 - 04:00
are from Montenegro. Also tall women wearing four-inch spiked heels. No, I don’t want to be a tall woman or a tall man. Too much bending. Better a student of reaching. But ahh—glimpsing the willow revises me completely . . . (Subscription required.)

Sherman Alexie: “The Facebook Sonnet.”

Mon, 05/09/2011 - 04:00
Welcome to the endless high-school Reunion. Welcome to past friends And lovers, however kind or cruel. Let’s undervalue and unmend The present. Why can’t we pretend Every stage of life is the same? Let’s exhume, resume, and extend Childhood. Let’s all . . . (Subscription required.)

Michael Ondaatje: “The Cat’s Table.”

Mon, 05/09/2011 - 04:00
He wasn’t talking. He was looking out the window of the car all the way. The two adults in the front seat spoke quietly under their breath. He could have listened if he wanted to but he didn’t. For a while, at the section of the . . . (Subscription required.)

Julith Jedamus: “The Drowning of Drenthe.”

Mon, 05/02/2011 - 04:00
I travelled to a level land Past sleeping towns with names of sand: Now they are gone. The polders from the marshes won, The houses made of brick, not stone: Raise no alarm. The linseed mill with icy arms, The whitewashed churches purged of charms Evade our look. The beeches . . . (Subscription required.)

Donald Antrim: “He Knew.”

Mon, 05/02/2011 - 04:00
When he felt good, or even vaguely a little bit good, and sometimes even when he was not, by psychiatric standards, well at all, but nonetheless had a notion that he might soon be coming out of the Dread, as he called it, he insisted on taking Alice to Bergdorf . . . (Subscription required.)

Christopher Benfey: “The Lorries.”

Mon, 05/02/2011 - 04:00
From the notebooks of Bruce Chatwin) 1. I am not too thrilled with Turkey. Today it has occurred to me what is missing— a sense of the absurd. Stung by a wasp in the lorry. (August 29, 1967) 2. Good subject for a story— the young camionero crushed . . . (Subscription required.)

Sam Lipsyte: “Deniers.”

Mon, 04/25/2011 - 04:00
8220;Trauma this, atrocity that, people ought to keep their traps shut,” Mandy’s father said. American traps tended to hang open. Pure crap poured out. What he and the others had gone through shouldn’t have a name, he told her friend Tovah, all those years . . .

Meredith Root-Bernstein: “Dismemberment.”

Mon, 04/25/2011 - 04:00
Your smile makes me think of Larry in “The Razor’s Edge.” Your voice is George singing “Got me escapin’ from this zoo.” Your eyes are a sculpture by Jesús Rafael Soto. Your body reminds me of the boy who resembled a . . . (Subscription required.)

Bob Hicok: “Cultural Studies.”

Mon, 04/25/2011 - 04:00
They were in the air on chairs, the bride and groom, when of course they needed a table so we lifted a table, a dishwasher and our shoulders were strong enough, a sofa and I began to understand the demands of Judaism when we let go and they stayed, decades . . . (Subscription required.)

Adam Zagajewski: “In Valleys.”

Mon, 04/25/2011 - 04:00
And the lovely Garonne, which passes through drowsy villages each night like a priest with the last sacrament. Dark clouds grow in the sky. The Visigoths live on, in certain faces. In summer the empire of insects spreads. You consider how not to be yourself: is it only on journeys . . . (Subscription required.)