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New Yorker Fiction

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Short stories and poems from The New Yorker.
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Edward Hirsch: “Liberty Brass.”

Mon, 03/08/2010 - 05:00
I was sitting across from the rotating sign For the Liberty Brass Turning Company Automatic Screw Machine Products And brooding about our fathers Always on the make to make more money Screw Machine Products Automatic Tender wounded brassy unsystematic Free American men obsessing about margins Machine Products Automatic Screw Selling . . .

David Means: “The Knocking.”

Mon, 03/08/2010 - 05:00
Upstairs, he stops for a moment, just to let the tension build, and then he begins again, softer at first, going east to west and then east again, heading toward the Fifth Avenue side of the building, pausing to get his bearings, to look out at the view, to taunt . . .

Barbara Ras: “Washing the Elephant.”

Mon, 03/08/2010 - 05:00
Isn’t it always the heart that wants to wash the elephant, begging the body to do it with soap and water, a ladder, hands, in tree shade big enough for the vast savannas of your sadness, the strangler fig of your guilt, the cratered full moon’s . . .

W. S. Merwin: “A Message to Po Chu-I”

Mon, 03/01/2010 - 05:00
In that tenth winter of your exile the cold never letting go of you and your hunger aching inside you day and night while you heard the voices out of the starving mouths around you old ones and infants and animals those curtains of bones swaying on stilts and you . . .

Jennifer Egan: “Ask Me If I Care.”

Mon, 03/01/2010 - 05:00
Late at night, when there’s nowhere left to go, we go to Alice’s house. Scotty drives his pickup, two of us squeezed in the front with him, blasting bootleg tapes of the Stranglers, the Mutants, Negative Trend, the other two stuck in the back, where you . . .

Derek Mahon: “The Thunder Shower.”

Mon, 03/01/2010 - 05:00
A blink of lightning, then a rumor, a grumble of white rain growing in volume, rustling over the ground, drenching the gravel in a wash of sound. Drops tap like timpani or shine like quavers on a line. It rings on exposed tin, a suite for water, wind and bin . . .

Saïd Sayrafiezadeh: “Appetite.”

Mon, 02/22/2010 - 05:00
Things were not going as I had hoped. My sole purpose for interrupting my manager at this late hour on this Monday night was to inquire, respectfully, about an increase in my wage. But the conversation had somehow reversed itself, and now here I was standing awkwardly in the doorway . . .

Gerald Stern: “Dream IV.”

Mon, 02/22/2010 - 05:00
I am so laden I grieve at 3 A.M. over two parking spaces I could have claimed or am fully frightened in a basement room choosing a Nobel laureate among the nine Israelis upstairs, especially when their phone call says you don’t have anything to be frightened of . . .

Charles Simic: “Preachers Warn.”

Mon, 02/22/2010 - 05:00
This peaceful world of ours is ready for destruction— And still the sun shines, the sparrows come Each morning to the bakery for crumbs. Next door, two men deliver a bed for a pair of newlyweds And stop to admire a bicycle chained to a parking meter. Its owner . . .

Dorothea Lasky: “Tornado.”

Mon, 02/08/2010 - 05:00
I remember he was bent down Like a whirlpool I was yelling at him He looked scared and backed away Another time, I squinted my eyes to see And he said I looked ugly The funny part was when My sister asked me where he went to And I just . . .

Claire Keegan: “Foster.”

Mon, 02/08/2010 - 05:00
Early on a Sunday, after first Mass in Clonegal, my father, instead of taking me home, drives deep into Wexford toward the coast, where my mother’s people came from. It is a hot August day, bright, with patches of shade and greenish sudden light along the road. We . . .

Ciaran Carson: “The Tag.”

Mon, 02/08/2010 - 05:00
round your wrist bore a number your name and D.O.B. two weeks after two stone less the day you came home it slipped off no need to snip . . .

Roberto Bolaño: “William Burns.”

Mon, 02/01/2010 - 05:00
William Burns, from Ventura, California, told this story to my friend Pancho Monge, a policeman in Santa Teresa, Sonora, who passed it on to me. According to Monge, the North American was a laid-back guy who never lost his cool, a description that seems to be at odds with . . .

Mark Doty: “Pescadero.”

Mon, 02/01/2010 - 05:00
The little goats like my mouth and fingers, and one stands up against the wire fence, and taps on the fence board a hoof made blacker by the dirt of the field, pushes her mouth forward to my mouth, so that I can see the smallish squared seeds of her . . .

Jane Hirshfield: “If Truth Is the Lure, Humans Are Fishes.”

Mon, 02/01/2010 - 05:00
Under each station of the real, another glimmers. And so the love of false-bottomed drawers and the salt mines outside Kraków, going down and down without drowning. A man harms his wife, his child. He says, “Here is the reason.” She says, “Here is . . .

Vijay Seshadri: “Visiting Paris.”

Mon, 01/25/2010 - 05:00
They were in the scullery talking. The meadow had to be sold to pay their riotous expenses; then the woods by the river, with its tangled banks and snags elbowing out of the water, had to go; and then the summer house where they talked— all that was left . . .

Kevin Barry: “Fjord of Killary.”

Mon, 01/25/2010 - 05:00
So I bought an old hotel on the fjord of Killary. It was set hard by the harbor wall, with Mweelrea Mountain across the water, and disgracefully gray skies above. It rained two hundred and eighty-seven days of the year, and the locals were given to magnificent mood swings . . .

Cynthia Cruz: “Diagnosis.”

Mon, 01/25/2010 - 05:00
Awkward, and almost always the idiot Savant, mutant, retard, I Travel my own effervescent weather, In my underwater Vessel, my sweet Mars, and soundless Daydream, magical sweep of Rimbaudian Reverie. Always Clumsy, and guileless, mind- Blind, and deathly shy, Winning every spelling bee, Every math contest, Done before the rest . . .

Robert Bly: “Sunday Afternoon.”

Mon, 01/18/2010 - 05:00
The snow is falling, and the world is calm. The flakes are light, but they cool the world As they fall, and add to the calm of the house. It’s Sunday afternoon. I am reading Longinus while the Super Bowl is on. The snow is falling, and the . . .

E. O. Wilson: “Trailhead.”

Mon, 01/18/2010 - 05:00
The Trailhead Queen was dead. At first, there was no overt sign that her long life was ending: no fever, no spasms, no farewells. She simply sat on the floor of the royal chamber and died. As in life, her body was prone and immobile, her legs and antennae relaxed . . .