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Greg Jackson Reads “Wagner in the Desert”

1Jan

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Greg Jackson Reads “Wagner in the Desert”

Listen and subscribe: Apple | Spotify | Google | Wherever You ListenSign 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 in Palm Springs, California, for the week between Christmas and New Year’s. Jackson, a winner of the National Book Foundation’s 5 Under 35 Award, is the author of the story collection “Prodigals” and the novel “The Dimensions of a Cave,” which was published in October, 2023.

Teju Cole Reads Anne Carson

Listen and subscribe: Apple | Spotify | Google | Wherever You ListenSign up to receive our weekly Books & Fiction newsletter.Photograph by Donavon Smallwood for The New YorkerTeju Cole joins Deborah Treisman to read and discuss “1=1,” by Anne Carson, which was published in The New Yorker in 2016. Cole’s novels include “Open City” and “Tremor,” which was published this year.

Tessa Hadley’s Longing to Put Life Into Words

Tessa Hadley recently published her thirtieth short story in The New Yorker—the first, “Lost and Found,” came out in 2002—and also, earlier in the summer, put out her twelfth book of fiction in just over two decades, the story collection “After the Funeral.” In a sense, Hadley, who published her first novel at forty-six, seems to be making up for lost time—narratives pouring out of her, albeit in finely crafted sentences and immersive paragraphs. As she once told me, stories, for her, “begin with those two questions, which sound so banal but are, in fact, the richest and most mysterious ones: What happened? And: What happened next?” She’s a writer whose eye for the telling detail and whose understanding of human behavior—what she calls her “empathetic imagination”—give her stories a kind ...