The New Yorker: Fiction Folgen

Sherman Alexie reads "The Lesson," by Jessamyn West.

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."

Maile Meloy reads Laurie Colwin's "Mr. Parker" and discusses it with The New Yorker's fiction editor, Deborah Treisman. "Mr. Parker" was published in the April 14, 1973, issue of The New Yorker and can be found in "Passion and Affect." Maile Meloy's novels include "Liars and Saints" and "A Family Daughter."