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 Joyce Carol Oates

read her story Late Love from the April 22nd 2024 issue of the magazine.

Oates, a winner of the National Humanities Medal and the Jerusalem Prize, among others, is the author of more than 70 books of fiction.

A new novel, Butcher, and a story collection, Flint Kil Creek, will be published later this year.

Now here's Joyce Carroll Oates. Late Love.

They were newly married, each for the second time after living alone for years, like two grazing creatures from separate pastors suddenly finding themselves, who

knows why, heard it into the same metal and grazing the same turf. That they were not young, though described I

observers as amazingly youthful, must have been a strong component of their

attraction to each other.

K, a widow, and T, divorced a decade previously from a woman who was now deceased,

each lonely amid a busy milieu of friends and colleagues.

The widow believed herself more devastated by life than the new husband,

whose reputation as a historian and a public intellectual, reinforced the collective impression that he was a man

whom wife had treated well. Only she, once she was his wife, understood how self-doubting the husband was, how impatient with

people who agreed with him, flattered him, and looked up to him.

Excuse me, darling, thank you very much, but don't humor me. This remark,

utter to the wife in private, was both playful and the

larger and more distinguished of their two houses,

the larger and more distinguished of their two houses,

a sprawling five bedroom dark shingled American craftsman with national

landmark status on a ridge above the university, the husband woke the wife in the night talking into sleep or rather arguing

...