The New Yorker: Fiction

Robert Coover reads "The Daughters of the Moon," by Italo Calvino. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Richard Ford reads "The State of Grace," by Harold Brodkey. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Margaret Atwood reads "Voices Lost in Snow," by Mavis Gallant. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Edwidge Danticat reads "Girl" and "Wingless," by Jamaica Kincaid. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Francisco Goldman reads "Clara," by Roberto Bolano. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Tony Earley reads "Love," by William Maxwell. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Hisham Matar reads "Shakespeare's Memory," by Jorge Luis Borges. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

David Sedaris reads "Roy Spivey," by Miranda July. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Sherman Alexie reads "The Lesson," by Jessamyn West. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

In this month's fiction podcast, Tessa Hadley reads "City Lovers," a story by the South African writer and 1991 Nobel Prize winner Nadine Gordimer. The story, which was published in The New Yorker in 1975, focusses on a love affair between a white man and a "colored" woman in Apartheid South Africa. It's deeply political in its details--the man is a geologist at a mining company, the couple's affair is illegal, and they cover it up by pretending that she is his servant. But Gordimer writes with a focussed intimacy that makes the piece a tragic love story rather than a political morality tale. "One of the things I think she can teach us," says Hadley, "is how to write politically without becoming shrill." Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices