This is The Writers Voice, new fiction from the New Yorker.

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

On this episode of The Writers Voice, we'll hear Treisman fiction editor at the New Yorker.

On this episode of the writer's voice, we'll hear Hari Kunzru read his story, A Transparent

Woman, from the July 6th and 13th 2020 issue of the magazine.

Kunzru is the author of five novels including God's Without Men and White Tears.

A new novel, Red Pill, from which this story was adapted, will be published in September. Now here's Hari Kuntzru.

A Transparent Woman

Her family was happy about it.

It was a big deal to get one of the new places. The entire district was a building site, a showcase for the socialist future.

She reckoned she had about five more years before she turned into one of the horrible sows who gave her

the evil eye from behind their net curtains when she walked

past with her friends. Five years of life. At weekend she'd take the train to Alexander Platz and hang around

with the other teenagers.

Sooner or later they were always chased away by the police.

She never got on at school and left to become an apprentice at a textile factory in a town just outside Berlin,

which improved things because she could move out of the family home and live in a hostile.

It was okay at first, but the boredom was like acid.

She had a bad temper and sometimes got into fights.

One day some old Pishnaps cabbage man at the factory called her into an office and gave her an official warning.

She already had a mark against her because she didn't want to join the free German youth. Every weekend she'd take the train back to the city. The first time she saw

punks it was amazing like being electrocuted jolted out of her dead skin.

...