This is The writer's voice, new fiction from the New Yorker.

I'm Deborah Treisman, fiction editor at The New Yorker.

On this episode of the writer's voice, we'll hear Caleb Crane read his story,

Keats of 24, from the December 11th, 2023 issue of the magazine.

Crane is the author of one book of non-fiction and two novels,

necessary errors which was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award and

overthrow which was published in 2019.

Now here's Caleb Crane. Keats at 24. By spring he had got to the point of thinking that virtue was a matter of not saying things, which was a little problematic for him as a writer but not absolutely fatal.

There was still something to be said for not saying everything, though not of course as much

as there once had been.

To the extent that there was a specific challenge he was facing,

it was that he didn't seem to be able to finish a book he had started writing a few years before.

He didn't seem to want to finish it. He seemed to be having the same problem with the half dozen books he was ostensibly reading,

several of which were, practically speaking, too long to be really finishable.

Thoreau's Journal, Plato, a second time through, Proust and French.

I mean. Maybe he had come to prefer things that resisted being brought

to an end that could be repeated or extended as long as one wanted.

Birding, cross-fit, the scroll of a feed.

Sometimes it seemed as if all the habits of his middle age had this character.

There were no milestones left for him to look forward to, after all, except headstones.

He was married.

For some time now he and his husband had been too old to have children. He had long ago gone to more school than he knew what to do with.

...