Short stories and poems from The New Yorker.
Updated: 30 min 2 sec ago
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.
Mon, 07/05/2010 - 04:00
Mine, I know, started at a distance
five hundred and twenty light-years away
and fell as stardust into my sleeping mouth,
yesterday, at birth, or that time when I was ten
lying on my back looking up at the cluster
called the Beehive or by its other name
in . . .
Mon, 07/05/2010 - 04:00
And when I pulled it out of my pocket I thought surely
all this has been done before. And my smirched muse
answered, wholly in secret: What are apron strings
for? Your comment-clad walls feign disinterest
and sixes or sevens more, yet the petering out
of rivers will always . . .
Mon, 07/05/2010 - 04:00
Thirty-five years after my father left Ethiopia, he died in a room in a boarding house in Peoria, Illinois, that came with a partial view of the river. We had never spoken much during his lifetime, but, on a warm October morning in New York shortly after he died . . .
Mon, 06/28/2010 - 04:00
It is just as Kate hoped. The worn path, the bells tinkling on the gate. The huge fir trees dropping their needles one by one. A sweet mushroomy smell, gnomes stationed in the underbrush, the sound of a mandolin far up on the hill. “We’re here, we . . .
Mon, 06/28/2010 - 04:00
The old
to-and-fro
is newly cloaked
in purpose.
There’s a jumble
of hair and teeth
under the bedclothes
in the forest.
“The better to eat you with,”
it says,
and nibbles us
until we laugh.
*
An axeman
comes to help.
*
“To, to,” . . .
Mon, 06/28/2010 - 04:00
July 4th fireworks exhale over the Hudson sadly.
It is beautiful that they have to disappear.
It’s like the time you said I love you madly.
That was an hour ago. It’s been a fervent year.
I don’t really love fireworks, not really, the . . .
Mon, 06/21/2010 - 04:00
My lyre has fallen & broken,
but I have my little tom-toms.
Look, do you see those crows
perched on the guardhouse?
I don’t wish to speak of omens
but sometimes it’s hard to guess.
Life has been good the past few years.
I know . . .
Mon, 06/21/2010 - 04:00
Four or five years after we got married, Your Honor, S. and I were invited to a dinner party at the home of a German dancer, who was then living in New York. At the time, S. worked at a theatre where the dancer was performing a solo piece. The . . .
Mon, 06/21/2010 - 04:00
She loves to talk on the phone
while washing the dinner dishes,
catching up long distance or
dealing with issues closer to home,
the reconnoitring with the long lost
or a recent so-and-so. She finds it
therapeutic, washing down
the aftermath. And that feeling
she gets in her . . .
Mon, 06/07/2010 - 04:00
The boy wore a black parka, a matching ski cap, bluejeans, and sneakers; he appeared to be five years old; and he was weeping.
He stood at Gate C3, Hamburg-Fuhlsbüttel Airport, his padded arms limp at his sides. He was talking through his sobs—not shouting . . .
Mon, 06/07/2010 - 04:00
People say no one reads anymore, but I find that’s not the case. Prisoners read. I guess they’re not given much access to computers. A felicitous injustice for me. The nicest reader letters I’ve received—also the only reader letters I’ve . . .
Mon, 06/07/2010 - 04:00
Live as if you were already dead.
—Zen admonition.
1. About the Dead Man and Vertigo
The dead man skipped stones till his arm gave out.
He showed up early to the games and stayed late, he played with abandon, he felt the unease in results.
His medicine is . . .
Mon, 06/07/2010 - 04:00
June 1, Rome.
Lucky diary! Undeserving diary! From this day forward, you will travel on the greatest adventure yet undertaken by a nervous, average man sixty-nine inches in height, a hundred and sixty pounds in heft, with a slightly dangerous body-mass index of 23.6. From this day forward . . .
