This is the writer's voice new fiction from the New Yorker. I'm Deborah

Treisman fiction at the New Yorker. On this episode of the writer's voice, we'll hear

Ben Lerner read his story The Media from the April 20th 2020 issue of the magazine.

Lerner is the author of the novels Leaving the Atoches Station, 1004, and the Topeka School, which was published last year.

He was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 2015. Now here's Ben Lerner.

The Media.

Walking at dusk through the long meadow, recording this prose poem on my phone, that's my job, as old as soldiery, the hills, the soldered hills, where current flows, green current. When you were finished recording, your lips are dried flowers, the trees are full of black

plastic bags and hornets nests but not significance.

The task of imbuing them falls to me.

And it's me, Ben, just calling to check in.

I'm on the way to pick Marcella up from daycare and just wanted to hear about your trip.

I'm sure it must have been hard seeing him like that.

Anyway, I love you and I'm here.

Give me a call when you can.

I'll be around until the late 19th century when carved wood gives way to polish steel, especially in lake surfaces.

You know how you sometimes realize it has been raining only when it stops,

silence falling on the roof, forming rivulets on the glass?

This is the religious equivalent of that, especially in music and applied fields, long meadows.

Overwintering Queens make wonderful pets.

Just don't expect them to understand your writing,

how you've rearranged the stresses to sponsor feelings in advance of the collective

subject who might feel them.

...