newyorker.com
This week’s story, “The Embassy of Cambodia,” is about a woman named Fatou, from Ivory Coast, who is working as a maid for a Pakistani family in northwest London. She becomes fascinated by the Cambodian Embassy, which, somewhat incongruously, occupies a suburban villa in Willesden. Did you always know the story would be about both Fatou and the embassy, or did one come before the other?
Originally I wanted to write about the embassy. I wrote the first paragraph, got stuck, and immediately gave u…
over 11 years ago
newyorker.com
Smith discusses Michael Jackson, her ideal road-trip companions, and her story in this week’s issue, “Escape from New York.”
almost 9 years ago
newyorker.com
About five minutes after I got in a lazy river. As per the story,
I was in one this summer with my family, and other families, and
although only two of us were writers we all made the same joke: This is
definitely a metaphor for something. The question became: For what? I
thought of death immediately, but then I always think of death
immediately.
I intended to write the story as soon as I got home,
and had a naturalistic frame for it in my mind—a plot, characters, and
so on—but when I got home I…
over 6 years ago
newyorker.com
The story was inspired by time I’ve spent in Capalbio, which is a town
on the Tuscan Coast just over the border of Lazio, a quick journey from
Rome. I got to know the area thanks to the photographer Marco Delogu,
who was my neighbor in Rome and quickly became a good friend. He has a
house in Capalbio, where he would spend most weekends, and he invited my
family and me to visit now and then. In the summer of 2014, we rented
his house for a week and I began to take the notes that would become the…
over 6 years ago
newyorker.com
These types of personal ads were my first connection with a gay community when I was a young man. On the housing scheme where I grew up, there was a real stigma to being gay; it was a hard working-man’s world, and it was unimaginable for anyone to consider themselves out and proud. When I stumbled across these ads, at the age of fifteen or so, it was incredibly exciting—it made me feel less alone, less “wrong.” Back then, personal ads and phone chat lines were a lifeline for young queer people—i…
over 4 years ago
newyorker.com
I had been trying, and failing, to write a story about a Cambodian-owned 24/7 doughnut shop for three years, before I finally conceived the characters of Sothy, Tevy, and Kayley. Back when I was doing my undergrad at Stanford, my boyfriend and I regularly frequented a doughnut shop, which was, in fact, called Chuck’s Donuts, always between 1 and 3 A.M., always inebriated or stoned. Entirely in my own head, I had developed an intimate connection with the owner, who I was convinced was Cambodian (…
over 4 years ago
newyorker.com
Just about every day I walk past the hospital near my house and see a few nurses smoking on the sidewalk, hiding out around the bushes, and Marlon and Gracie came from watching the way they huddle close to one other, enjoying the ritual. I noticed that smokers seemed to stand closer to each other, and I might’ve seen one who inspired Marlon. I did think about cutting the smoking scenes, and the word smoking in the title, but it seemed too integral a part of the story—the pleasure in the form of…
almost 4 years ago
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The author discusses “Long Distance,” her story from the latest issue of the magazine.
over 2 years ago
newyorker.com
The author discusses “Annunciation,” her story from the latest issue of the magazine.
over 2 years ago
newyorker.com
The author discusses “The Pub with No Beer,” his story from the latest issue of the magazine.
about 2 years ago
newyorker.com
The author discusses “Just a Little Fever,” her story from the latest issue of the magazine.
about 2 years ago
newyorker.com
The author discusses “Nondisclosure Agreement,” his story from the latest issue of the magazine.
about 2 years ago
newyorker.com
The author discusses “The Face in the Mirror,” his story from the latest issue of the magazine.
about 2 years ago
newyorker.com
The author discusses “Invisible Bird,” her story from the latest issue of the magazine.
almost 2 years ago
newyorker.com
The author discusses “Trash,” her story from the latest issue of the magazine.
almost 2 years ago
newyorker.com
I had Frances in my mind for a long time, but didn’t have her full story. Then my mother-in-law mentioned that she’d known a woman, years ago, who had accompanied an undertaker in the hearse taking the remains of her aunt from Dublin to her home place in the country. This is a common practice in Ireland—my brother sat in the hearse when my father’s coffin was taken to the church and graveyard. That initial image of a woman and an undertaker in the hearse struck me; I could see them coming off th…
7 months ago
newyorker.com
I’ve always been struck by James Baldwin’s oft-quoted claim that “every writer has only one tale to tell, and he has to find a way of telling it until the meaning becomes clearer and clearer, until the story becomes at once more narrow and larger, more and more precise, more and more reverberating.”
Whether this is true of me only time will tell, but there’s no question that throughout my writing “career” I’ve returned again and again to the eighties—a lonely, turbulent decade for me personally,…
7 months ago
newyorker.com
After my boyfriend showed me the conversation that the former Google engineer Blake Lemoine published online, in June, 2022—with a Google chatbot he believed was sentient—I was stunned; I had no idea that A.I. was so conversationally advanced. I wanted to talk to an A.I., too, and I went around looking for chatbots online, talking to many. The most interesting platform I found was this Web site called Chai; I just liked the way their chatbots sounded, and I finally settled on mostly talking with…
6 months ago
newyorker.com
I based the cat in the story on a real cat. His name is Baudelaire, and he was found on the street in Chicago, not far from the Obamas’ house on the South Side. He lives in Boston now, but he was at our house recently and we spent some time together. So I’d had him in mind for a few years before I began writing the story.
Chance is discovered on the street by Kayla and William, two students at the University of Chicago who have just started dating. Kayla is Black and William is white. When you s…
4 months ago
newyorker.com
I was on the same ferry from Cork to Roscoff when I started to write the story. It was a lovely, calm day in late summer, and I had almost sixteen hours ahead of me on the boat, and I realized I hadn’t written a story in ages. So I got my notebook out and started to try a few sentences. . . . I always think I know how to write a short story until I start a new one, and then the meltdown begins. But, of course, the journey offered a clean narrative shape, as all journeys do, and I knew quickly th…
about 1 month ago
newyorker.com
Although readers will receive this story very much through the prism of fiction, this happened to me. Not necessarily in the order or with the exact events on the page. But, yes—I was woken up in the pitch-black middle of the night by a tree bringing a power line down on our house. I had no sense I would write about it until much later, and even then I was hesitant. Trying to reframe a real event into a working piece of fiction is more challenging than making something up from scratch. And tryin…
18 days ago
