Tag: fiction

Greetings, Fictioneers!

On Sunday, October 11th, 2026 at 4 pm CT/5 pm ET/3 pm MT/2 pm PT, at Zoom link https://bit.ly/cehcsunday, we will discuss the New Yorker Fiction story from The New Yorker dated October 12th, 2026: “A Very Safe Place” by Rachel Heng. You are welcome to join us.

A longer story this week: 7,620 words, 42+ minutes, 2 cartoons.

1. Read “A Very Safe Place” at this link. Try a private or incognito window if blocked by the New Yorker’s paywall or through the Libby app via your local public library “card”.
2. Want to listen to it? Use the “Listen to this story” audio module on the story page (42 minutes at 1x speed) or at this link (46:20 with intro and ads). Blocked from those? Try this link.
3. An interview with the author, “Rachel Heng on Safety and the Power of the Child’s-Eye View”, is at this link.

If you prefer connecting by phone, the “one tap mobile” number is +13126266799,,88112982706#,,,,*007936# US (Chicago)

<quote> Rachel Heng (born 13 May 1988) is a Singaporean novelist and the author of literary dystopian novel Suicide Club (2018) and award-winning The Great Reclamation (2023). Her short fiction has been published in many literary journals including The New Yorker, Glimmer Train, Tin House, and The Minnesota Review. Her fiction has received recognition from the Pushcart Prize, the Andrew Carnegie Medals for Excellence, and the New American Voices Award by the Institute for Immigration Research, and she has been profiled by the BBC, Electric Literature, and other publications.

Early life and education

Rachel Heng majored in comparative literature at Columbia University, graduating in 2011. She then worked in the private equity industry in London. She received a James A. Michener Fellowship to pursue a MFA in fiction and screenwriting at the University of Texas at Austin’s Michener Center for Writers.

Career

Heng’s first novel Suicide Club was published by Hachette’s Sceptre imprint in the UK, and Macmillan’s Henry Holt imprint in the US in July 2018. The manuscript won a six-figure publishing deal after a bidding auction between international publishers. The novel is a piece of dystopian fiction set in a world of compulsory state-managed longevity, and satirizes contemporary culture’s obsession with health. The plot centers on a group of rebels called the “Suicide Club” which circulates secretly-filmed videos of their own suicides as a form of release and protest against the health-obsessed establishment. The novel was inspired by dystopian pieces such as George Orwell’s Animal Farm and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. Heng’s novel was named a most anticipated novel of the summer by The Huffington Post, Gizmodo, The Irish Times, The Millions, Bustle, Nylon and Elle. Critics have compared Suicide Club favourably to Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club and Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray. Suicide Club had been translated into 10 languages worldwide.

Her second novel The Great Reclamation was published by Riverhead Books in March 2023. It won the New American Voices Award in 2023, was longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence 2024, and was named a New York Times Editors’ Choice and a “Best Book of 2023 So Far” by The New Yorker and Amazon Books.

…

<endquote>

See more at Wikipedia English’s Rachel_Heng page

Greetings, Fictioneers!

On Sunday, October 4th, 2026 at 4 pm CT/5 pm ET/3 pm MT/2 pm PT, at Zoom link https://bit.ly/cehcsunday, we will discuss the New Yorker Fiction story from The New Yorker dated October 5th, 2026: “Narrow Escape”, by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. You are welcome to join us.

The story is drawn from Love the Revolution: An Unfinished Novel. It is очень короткий рассказ, that is, a very short story: a bit more than 3000 words, 1 cartoon, and 20:33 minutes as I read it (see item 2. below).

1. Read “Narrow Escape” at this link. Try a private or incognito window if blocked by the New Yorker’s paywall or through the Libby app via your local public library “card”.
2. As there is no official recording, I’ve recorded the story with numerous fumbles and without the open time to repeat flubbed paragraphs and digitally trim out the errors. Be kind. Use this link. It’s a 13.7 MB fie so may take some loading time.
3. An interview with Solzhernitsyn’s son, “Fiction by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, in English for the First Time”, is at this link.

If you prefer connecting by phone, the “one tap mobile” number is +13126266799,,88112982706#,,,,*007936# US (Chicago)

<quote> Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn (11 December 1918 – 3 August 2008) was a Soviet and Russian author and dissident who helped to raise global awareness of political repression in the Soviet Union, especially the Gulag prison system. He was awarded the 1970 Nobel Prize in Literature “for the ethical force with which he has pursued the indispensable traditions of Russian literature”. His nonfiction work The Gulag Archipelago “amounted to a head-on challenge to the Soviet state” and sold tens of millions of copies.

Solzhenitsyn was born into a family that defied the Soviet anti-religious campaign in the 1920s and remained devout members of the Russian Orthodox Church. At a young age he became an atheist and embraced Marxism–Leninism. While serving as a captain in the Red Army during World War II, Solzhenitsyn was arrested by SMERSH and sentenced to eight years in the Gulag and then internal exile for criticizing Joseph Stalin in private correspondence with another field officer. As a result of his experience in prison and the camps, he gradually became a philosophically minded Eastern Orthodox Christian.

During the Khrushchev Thaw, Solzhenitsyn was released and exonerated. He started writing novels about his experiences and repression in the Soviet Union. In 1962, he published his first novel, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich—an account of Stalinist repressions—with approval from Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev. His last work to be published in the Soviet Union was [the short story] “Matryona’s Place” in 1963. After Khrushchev lost power, Soviet authorities unsuccessfully tried to discourage Solzhenitsyn from writing. His novels published in other countries included Cancer Ward in 1966, In the First Circle in 1968 and August 1914 in 1971. His three-volume non-fiction book, The Gulag Archipelago, was published in 1973. The last outraged authorities and, in 1974, he was stripped of his Soviet citizenship and flown to West Germany. He soon moved to Switzerland and then, in 1976, to Vermont in the United States with his family. He continued to write and his Soviet citizenship was restored in 1990. He returned to Russia four years later and remained there until his death in 2008.

…

<endquote>

See more at Wikipedia English’s Aleksandr_Solzhenitsyn page

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• 

  New Yorker Fiction Circle: “A Very Safe Place” by Rachel Heng

  October 11 @ 4:00 pm – 5:00 pm CDT

Greetings, Fictioneers!

On Sunday, September 27th, 2026 at 4 pm CT/5 pm ET/3 pm MT/2 pm PT, at Zoom link https://bit.ly/cehcsunday, we will discuss the New Yorker Fiction story from The New Yorker dated September 28, 2026: “Dark Horse” by Sarah Anderson. You are welcome to join us.

This is Anderson’s first New Yorker Fiction. The Stats: ~5900 words, 35 minutes, 1 cartoon, but lots of ads.

1. Read “Dark Horse” at this link. Try a private or incognito window if blocked by the New Yorker’s paywall or through the Libby app via your local public library “card”.
2. Want to listen to it? Use the “Listen to this story” audio module on the story page (35 minutes at 1x speed) or at this link (39:35 with intro and ads). Blocked from those? Try this link.
3. The author interview, “Sarah Anderson on Relief from Intrusive Thoughts”, is at this link.

If you prefer connecting by phone, the “one tap mobile” number is +13126266799,,88112982706#,,,,*007936# US (Chicago)

From the author’s website:

<quote> I’m a writer based in Gainesville, Florida. My short story “Take Me to Kirkland” (originally published in Joyland) was selected for the Best American Short Stories 2025 anthology.

My work has also been published in Epiphany  magazine, nominated for the Pushcart Prize, won two Hopwood Awards, and received support from the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund.

I’m a recent graduate of the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at University of Michigan. My debut novel Fallow is forthcoming from Farrar, Straus, and Giroux in Fall 2026.

<endquote>

See more at https://www.sarahwanderson.com

Related Events

• 

  New Yorker Fiction Circle: “A Very Safe Place” by Rachel Heng

  October 11 @ 4:00 pm – 5:00 pm CDT

Welcome back, Fictioneers!

On Sunday, September 20th, 2026 at 4 pm CT/5 pm ET/3 pm MT/2 pm PT, at Zoom link https://bit.ly/cehcsunday, we will discuss the New Yorker Fiction story from The New Yorker dated September 21, 2026: “Lost Child” by Joyce Carol Oates. You are welcome to join us.

The Stats: ~5000 words, 35 minutes, 2 cartoons, no poem.

1. Read “Lost Child” at this link. Try a private or incognito window if blocked by the New Yorker’s paywall or through the Libby app via your local public library “card”.
2. Want to listen to it? Use the “Listen to this story” audio module on the story page (35 minutes at 1x speed) or at this link (38:48 with intro and ads). Blocked from those? Try this link.
3. The author interview, “Joyce Carol Oates on Embedded Memories”, is at this link.

If you prefer connecting by phone, the “one tap mobile” number is +13126266799,,88112982706#,,,,*007936# US (Chicago)

Do we really need a bio for JCO? I’ll just share the early days in dank Western New York. Use the link for the whole Wikipage (more than a hundred links)

<quote>

Joyce Carol Oates (born June 16, 1938) is an American writer. Oates published her first book in 1963, and has since published 58 novels, a number of plays and novellas, and many volumes of short stories, poetry, and nonfiction. Her novels Black Water (1992), What I Lived For (1994), and Blonde (2000), and her short story collection Lovely, Dark, Deep: Stories (2014) were each finalists for the Pulitzer Prize. She has won many awards for her writing, including the National Book Award for her novel Them (1969), two O. Henry Awards, the National Humanities Medal, and the Jerusalem Prize (2019).

Oates taught at Princeton University from 1978 to 2014, and is the Roger S. Berlind ’52 Professor Emerita in the Humanities with the Program in Creative Writing. From 2016 to 2020, she was a visiting professor at the University of California, Berkeley, where she taught short fiction in the spring semesters. She now teaches at Rutgers University, New Brunswick.

Early life and education

Oates was born in Lockport, New York, the eldest of three children of Carolina (née Bush), a homemaker of Hungarian descent, and Frederic James Oates, a tool and die designer. She grew up on her parents’ farm outside the town.

Her brother, Fred Jr., and sister, Lynn Ann, were born in 1943 and 1956, respectively. Lynn Ann has autism and is institutionalized, and (as of 2015) Oates has not seen her since 1971. Oates grew up in the working-class farming community of Millersport, New York. She characterized hers as “a happy, close-knit and unextraordinary family for our time, place and economic status”, but her childhood as “a daily scramble for existence”.

Her widowed paternal grandmother, Blanche Woodside (née Morningstar), lived with the family and was “very close” to Joyce. After Blanche’s death, Joyce learned that Blanche’s father had killed himself. She also found out that Blanche was Jewish who hid her identity in order to escape persecution and chose not to disclose this to Oates. Oates eventually drew on aspects of her grandmother’s life in writing the novel The Gravedigger’s Daughter (2007).

Violence marred the lives of Oates and her recent ancestors: Oates’ mother’s biological father was murdered in 1917, which led to Oates’ mother’s informal adoption. At age fourteen, Oates’ paternal grandmother Blanche survived an attempted murder-suicide at the hands of her own father. He did kill himself. When Oates was a child, her next-door neighbor pleaded guilty to charges of arson and attempted murder of his family, and was sentenced to a prison term at Attica Correctional Facility.

Oates attended the same one-room school her mother had attended as a child. She became interested in reading at an early age and remembers Blanche’s gift of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) as “the great treasure of my childhood, and the most profound literary influence of my life. This was love at first sight!” In her early teens, she read the work of Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë, Fyodor Dostoevsky, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, and Henry David Thoreau, writers whose “influences remain very deep”.

Oates began writing at the age of 14, when Blanche gave her a typewriter. Oates later transferred to several bigger, suburban schools and graduated from Williamsville South High School in 1956, where she worked for her high school newspaper. She was the first in her family to complete high school.

As a teen, Oates also received early recognition for her writing by winning a Scholastic Art and Writing Award.

University

Oates earned a scholarship to attend Syracuse University, where she joined the Phi Mu fraternity for women. She found Syracuse to be “a very exciting place academically and intellectually”, and trained herself by “writing novel after novel and always throwing them out when I completed them”. It was at this point that Oates began reading the work of Franz Kafka, D. H. Lawrence, Thomas Mann, and Flannery O’Connor, and she noted, “these influences are still quite strong, pervasive”.

At the age of 19, she won the “college short story” contest sponsored by Mademoiselle. Oates was elected to Phi Beta Kappa as a junior and graduated valedictorian from Syracuse University with a B.A. summa cum laude in English in 1960, and received her M.A. from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1961. She was a Ph.D. student at Rice University but left to become a full-time writer.

Evelyn Shrifte, president of the Vanguard Press, met Oates soon after Oates received her master’s degree. “She was fresh out of school, and I thought she was a genius”, Shrifte said. Vanguard published Oates’ first book, the short-story collection By the North Gate, in 1963.

…

<endquote>

See MUCH more at Wikipedia English’s Joyce_Carol_Oates page

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• 

  New Yorker Fiction Circle: “A Very Safe Place” by Rachel Heng

  October 11 @ 4:00 pm – 5:00 pm CDT

Welcome back, Fictioneers!

On Sunday, September 13th, 2026 at 4 pm CT/5 pm ET/3 pm MT/2 pm PT, at Zoom link https://bit.ly/cehcsunday, we will discuss the New Yorker Fiction story from The New Yorker dated September 14, 2026: “New Shoes” by Hisham Matar. You are welcome to join us.

This one counts in at just under 4000 words and clocks in at 28+ minutes, respectively. I didn’t see a cartoon on the digital page.

1. Read “New Shoes” at this link. Try a private or incognito window if blocked by the New Yorker’s paywall or through the Libby app via your local public library “card”.
2. Want to listen to it? Use the “Listen to this story” audio module on the story page (28 minutes at 1x speed) or at this link (32:11 with intro and ads). Blocked from those? Try this link.
3. The author interview, “Hisham Matar on the Outsider in London”, is at this link.

If you prefer connecting by phone, the “one tap mobile” number is +13126266799,,88112982706#,,,,*007936# US (Chicago)

<quote>

“Hisham Matar (Arabic: هشام مطر; born 1970) is an American-born British-Libyan novelist, essayist, and memoirist. His debut novel In the Country of Men was shortlisted for the 2006 Man Booker Prize, and his memoir of the search for his father, The Return, won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography and several other awards. Matar’s essays have appeared in The New Yorker, The Guardian, The New York Times, and many other publications. He has also written several other novels.

Early life and education

Hisham Matar was born in New York City in 1970, the son of Jaballa Matar, who was considered a political dissident for his opinions on Colonel Muammar Qaddafi’s 1969 coup, and had to move the family away from Tripoli. He was working for the Libyan delegation to the United Nations, in New York, at the time of Matar’s birth.

The family moved back to Tripoli in 1973, but fled the country again in 1979. Matar was nine when they moved to Cairo, Egypt, where the family lived in exile from 1980, and where Matar’s father became more vocal against the Gaddafi regime.

After starting off in a public school in Cairo, Matar continued his schooling at Cairo American College from the age of 12. He did not enjoy his schooling there, and his academic achievements plunged compared with his time in Libyan and Egyptian public schools. He struggled with learning English, until he discovered a love for Billie Holiday, and also felt no affinity for his fellow students, most of whom were the offspring of American diplomats and military personnel.

In 1982, Matar’s brother Ziad left for boarding school in the Swiss Alps. Though Matar desperately wanted to join his brother, he had to wait four more years until he too was 16. Because of the continued threats by the Libyan dictatorship against their father (as well as a threat to Ziad’s safety while he was studying in Switzerland), however, he could not follow his brother to Switzerland. Both boys had to attend the schools under a false identity. Matar chose a school in England and enrolled in 1986, and started enjoying school again. He said in 2011:

I was to pretend that my mother was Egyptian and my father American. It was thought that this would explain, to any Arabs in the school, why my Arabic was Egyptian and why my English was American. My first name was Bob. Ziad chose it because both he and I were fans of Bob Marley and Bob Dylan. I was to pretend I was Christian, though not religious. I was to try to forget my name. If someone called Hisham, I was not to turn.

After trying his hand at music and finding that he had no talent for it, Matar studied architecture at Goldsmiths, University of London.

In 1990, while he was still studying in London, his father was abducted in Cairo. He has been reported missing ever since. In 1996, the family received two letters in his father’s handwriting stating that he had been kidnapped by the Egyptian secret police, handed over to the Libyan regime, and imprisoned in the notorious Abu Salim prison in the heart of Tripoli. The letters were the last sign and only thing they had heard from him or about his whereabouts. In 2009, Matar reported that he had received news that his father had been seen alive in 2002, indicating that Jaballa had survived a 1996 massacre of 1200 political prisoners by the Libyan authorities.

Career

For some years during his 20s, Matar ran his own architectural practice in London.

He started writing poetry, before moving to prose forms, as he found that his poems were becoming more narrative. He left his architectural practice, and worked in a variety of jobs, including acting, stonemasonry, and bookbinding, until his first novel, In the Country of Men was published in 2006.

As of October 2024 Matar is professor of professional practice in English and Asian and Middle Eastern cultures at Barnard College, Columbia University, but continues to live in London. He founded and is the principal curator of the Barnard International Artists Series, “a forum for considering the world through the works of living artists” (BIAS), which was launched in November 2012.

Writing style, themes, and process

Matar has explored themes of loss and exile in his first two novels, as well as in his memoir, The Return: Fathers, Sons and the Land in Between. Matar’s writing often borrows from and refers to painting, architecture, and music.

Matar on his writing process:

I start with very little: the more fragile, the better. The thread has to feel like it is about to snap. Sometimes I begin with a gesture or, in the case of “Naima,” a feeling for a character. I had this feeling for Nuri, the protagonist and narrator. It is like that moment when you rush into the concert hall at the last minute. You find your seat as the lights go down. You have not seen the person sitting beside you, but you have a sense of them, of what they might be like, or of how the music is affecting them, the weight of their silence.

— Hisham Matar, The O. Henry Prize Stories

<endquote>

From Wikipedia English’s Hisham_Matar page

Related Events

• 

  New Yorker Fiction Circle: “A Very Safe Place” by Rachel Heng

  October 11 @ 4:00 pm – 5:00 pm CDT

Welcome back, Fictioneers!

On Sunday, September 6th, 2026 at 4 pm CT/5 pm ET/3 pm MT/2 pm PT, at Zoom link https://bit.ly/cehcsunday, we will discuss the New Yorker Fiction story from The New Yorker dated September 7, 2026: “Lub Dub Lub Dub Lub Dub” by Helen Simpson. You are welcome to join us.

This one is a quickie: ~2700 words,  17 minutes, and one cartoon.

1. Read “Lub Dub Lub Dub Lub Dub” at this link. Try a private or incognito window if blocked by the New Yorker’s paywall or through the Libby app via your local public library “card”.
2. Want to listen to it? Use the “Listen to this story” audio module on the story page (17 minutes at 1x speed) or at this link (20:51 with intro and ads). Blocked from those? Try this link.
3. The author interview, “Helen Simpson on Our Timeline on This Planet”, is at this link.

If you prefer connecting by phone, the “one tap mobile” number is +13126266799,,88112982706#,,,,*007936# US (Chicago)

<quote>

“Helen Simpson (born 1959) is an English short story writer.

Early life and education

Simpson was born in Bristol, in the West of England, and grew up first in Wealdstone, then in a suburb of Croydon, where she attended a girls’ school. Her mother was a primary-school teacher and her father was a naval architect, who later taught. The first from her family to go to university, Simpson read English at the University of Oxford where she wrote a thesis on Restoration farce.

Career

Simpson worked at Vogue for five years, before her success in writing short stories meant she could afford to leave and concentrate full-time on her writing.

Her first collection, Four Bare Legs in a Bed and Other Stories, 1990, won the Somerset Maugham Award and the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award, and was followed in 1995 by a second collection, Dear George. Hey Yeah Right Get A Life, 2000, a series of interlinked stories, won the Hawthornden Prize, and was renamed Getting a Life for its US publication. She was awarded the E.M. Forster Award in 2002 by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her more recent story collections are: Constitutional (2005), renamed In the Driver’s Seat for its US publication; In-Flight Entertainment (2010); and Cockfosters (2015). A Bunch of Fives: Selected Stories was published in 2012.

In 1993, she was selected as one of Granta’s top 20 novelists under the age of 40.

In 2007, she published Homework short story. In 2009, she donated the short story “The Tipping Point” to Oxfam’s “Ox-Tales” project, four collections of UK stories written by 38 authors. Her story was published in the “Air” collection. She was a writer-in-residence for the charity First Story.

Many of her stories have been broadcast on BBC Radio, including “Café Society” and “Hurrah for the Hols” read by Tamsin Greig and abridged and produced by Amber Barnfather. 

In 2011, Simpson received a PEN/O.Henry Award for her story “Diary of an Interesting Year”. She was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1996. 

<endquote>

From Wikipedia English’s Helen_Simpson_(author) page

Related Events

• 

  New Yorker Fiction Circle: “A Very Safe Place” by Rachel Heng

  October 11 @ 4:00 pm – 5:00 pm CDT

Greetings, Fictioneers!

On Sunday, August 23, 2026 at 4 pm CT/5 pm ET/3 pm MT/2 pm PT, at Zoom link https://bit.ly/cehcsunday, we will discuss the New Yorker Fiction story from The New Yorker dated August 24 & 31, 2026: “Hidden Life” by Madhuri Vijay. You are welcome to join us.

Caveat lector: This is a long one, at ~7500 words and more than one hour on audio.

Also, note that this week’s story is from a two-week issue, so we will not meet on Sunday, August 30.

1. Read “Hidden Life” at this link. Try a private or incognito window if blocked by the New Yorker’s paywall or through the Libby app via your local public library “card”.
2. Want to listen to it? Use the “Listen to this story” audio module on the story page (63 minutes at 1x speed) or at this link (65:05 with intro and ads). Blocked from those? Try this link.
3. The author interview, “Madhuri Vijay on Cross-Generational Dynamics”, is at this link.

If you prefer connecting by phone, the “one tap mobile” number is +13126266799,,88112982706#,,,,*007936# US (Chicago)

<quote>

“Madhuri Vijay is an Indian author living in Hawaii. She is the author of The Far Field, which won the second JCB Prize for literature, India’s most prestigious literary award.

Early life

Vijay was born and grew up in Bangalore, India. In 2009, she graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Lawrence University, where she studied psychology and English. After graduation, she received a Watson Fellowship, which took her to South Africa, Malaysia, and Tanzania while studying people from India living in foreign lands. After the fellowship, she left to attend the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

Writing

Her debut novel on Kashmir, The Far Field, won the JCB Prize for literature. Vijay said she was surprised that the book was even published in India, where publishers were reluctant to take it on due to the “current climate in the country.”

She is a recipient of the Pushcart Prize and has been longlisted for the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature. Her writing has appeared in The Best American Nonrequired Reading, Narrative Magazine and Salon, among other publications. Her short story “You Are My Dear Friend”, published in the 17 August 2020 issue of The New Yorker, was also included in The Best American Short Stories 2021.

Personal life

As of 2019, Vijay lives in Hawaii, where she teaches English.

…

<endquote>

From Wikipedia English’s Madhuri_Vijay page Wikipedia’s Rachel_Yoder page.

Related Events

• 

  New Yorker Fiction Circle: “A Very Safe Place” by Rachel Heng

  October 11 @ 4:00 pm – 5:00 pm CDT

Greetings, Fictioneers!

On Sunday, August 16, 2026 at 4 pm CT/5 pm ET/3 pm MT/2 pm PT, at Zoom link https://bit.ly/cehcsunday, we will discuss the New Yorker Fiction story from The New Yorker dated August 17, 2026: “The Blight” by Emma Cline. Cline has contributed New Yorker Fiction since 2017, most recently with “Upstate”, about a vacationing couple. You are welcome to join us.

The story comprises a bit more than 5000 words, roughly 30 nominal reading minutes, going by recent stories.

1. Read “The Blight” at this link. Try a private or incognito window if blocked by the New Yorker’s paywall or through the Libby app via your local public library “card”.
2. Alas, we seem not to have audio this week. The author did not read her prior New Yorker story either.
3. The author interview, “Emma Cline on Rendering the Human Experience”, is at this link.

If you prefer connecting by phone, the “one tap mobile” number is +13126266799,,88112982706#,,,,*007936# US (Chicago)

<quote>

“Emma Cline is an American writer and novelist from California. She published her first novel, The Girls, in 2016, to positive reviews. The book was shortlisted for the John Leonard Prize from the National Book Critics Circle and the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize. Her story collection, Daddy, was published in 2020, and her second novel, The Guest, was published in 2023. Her stories have been published in The New Yorker, Tin House, Granta, and The Paris Review. In 2017, Cline was named one of Granta’s Best of Young American Novelists, and Forbes named her one of their “30 Under 30 in Media”. She is a recipient of the Plimpton Prize and was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship.

Life and career

Personal life

Cline, born in 1989, was raised in Sonoma County, California. She was the second of seven children in her family. After graduating from Sonoma Academy, at age 16, Cline attended Middlebury College, where she studied art. During her first year there, she won a writing award for her short story, “What is Lost”. After graduating, Cline attended Columbia University, where she received her MFA in 2013. While at Columbia, she wrote “Marion”, a short piece of fiction, which was published by The Paris Review in their Summer 2013 issue. A year later, The Paris Review awarded Cline the Plimpton Prize for the story. Since then, her writing has been published in multiple journals.

…

<endquote>

From Wikipedia English’s Emma_Cline pageFrom Wikipedia’s Rachel_Yoder page.

Related Events

• 

  New Yorker Fiction Circle: “A Very Safe Place” by Rachel Heng

  October 11 @ 4:00 pm – 5:00 pm CDT

On Sunday, August 9, 2026 at 4 pm CT/5 pm ET/3 pm MT/2 pm PT, at Zoom link https://bit.ly/cehcsunday, we will discuss the New Yorker Fiction story from The New Yorker dated August 10, 2026: “The Promise” by Rachel Yoder. It is Yoder’s first New Yorker fiction. You are welcome to join us.

1. Read “The Promise” at this link. Try a private or incognito window if blocked by the New Yorker’s paywall or through the Libby app via your local public library “card”.
2. Want to listen to it? Use the “Listen to this story” audio module on the story page (30 minutes at 1x speed) or at this link (33:53 with intro and ads). Blocked from those? Try this link.
3. The author interview, “Rachel Yoder on a Mennonite Childhood and a Story About the Devil”, is at this link.

If you prefer connecting by phone, the “one tap mobile” number is +13126266799,,88112982706#,,,,*007936# US (Chicago)

<quote>

“Rachel Yoder is an American writer from Iowa City, Iowa, best known for her novel Nightbitch.

Life and career

Yoder grew up in an intentional Mennonite community in the Appalachian foothills of eastern Ohio, before attending the University of Iowa Nonfiction Writing Program and earning an MFA from the University of Arizona. She earned an undergraduate degree from Georgetown University. She is the founder of “draft: the journal of process”.

In 2021, she released her debut novel Nightbitch, which was a “best book of the year” in Esquire and Vulture and a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel, among other awards. A 2024 film based on the book starred Amy Adams, whose performance received a Golden Globe nomination for “Best Performance by a Female Actor in a Motion Picture, Musical or Comedy”.

Yoder is currently Assistant Professor of Screenwriting and Cinema Arts at the University of Iowa.

Yoder suffers from chronic pain due to an immune disorder and has published a number of essays about her experience with this pain and the psychological ramifications it has had on her life.”

<endquote>

From Wikipedia’s Rachel_Yoder page.

Related Events

• 

  New Yorker Fiction Circle: “A Very Safe Place” by Rachel Heng

  October 11 @ 4:00 pm – 5:00 pm CDT

Greetings, Fictioneers!

This coming Sunday, August 2, 2026 at 4 pm CT/5 pm ET/3 pm MT/2 pm PT, at Zoom link https://bit.ly/cehcsunday, we will discuss the New Yorker Fiction story from The New Yorker dated August 3, 2026: “Earthly Delights” by Sheila Heti. You are welcome to join us.

Heti has contributed New Yorker Fictions since 2015, most recently with “The St.  Alwyn’s Girls at Sea” in January 2025.

1. Read “Earthly Delights” at this link. Try a private or incognito window if blocked by the New Yorker’s paywall or through the Libby app via your local public library “card”.
2. Want to listen to it? Use the “Listen to this story” audio module on the story page (25 minutes at 1x speed) or at this link (29:04 with intro and ads). Blocked from those? Try this link.
3. The author interview, “Sheila Heti on the Mystery of Lust”, is at this link.

If you prefer connecting by phone, the “one tap mobile” number is +13126266799,,88112982706#,,,,*007936# US (Chicago)

<quote>

“Sheila Heti was born on 25 December 1976 in Toronto. Her parents are Hungarian Jewish immigrants. Her brother is comedian David Heti.

“… Heti attended St. Clement’s School in Toronto. She graduated from North Toronto Collegiate Institute in Toronto. She then studied playwriting at the National Theatre School of Canada (leaving the program after one year) and then art history as well as philosophy at the University of Toronto. Heti said that Marquis de Sade and Henry Miller are early literary influences of hers.”

<endquote>

From Wikipedia’s Sheila Heti page.

Related Events

• 

  New Yorker Fiction Circle: “A Very Safe Place” by Rachel Heng

  October 11 @ 4:00 pm – 5:00 pm CDT