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 Writers Voice, we'll hear Treatment Fiction magazine. Tremmer was published earlier this year and a new book,

Pharmacon, a collection of prose pieces and photographs,

will be published in 2024.

Now here's Teju Kohl. coal.

Incoming.

Compromised

The night before everything came to an end,

Miss Prosper finally agreed to sing for us.

She was a serious woman,

a small woman with a heavy manner, though some later recalled a twinkle in

her eye and others a dry sense of humour. I remember only that her presence was full of

undescribed life and uncheapened by conclusions. But ah, when she began to sing, the seriousness was like oil she had saved for a day of need.

The song came out of her light and young, a hint at what she must have been before we knew her.

She held the final note of each phrase for a long time.

As we listen to the song that night in the apartment, a song in a dialect with few living speakers, a song she sang with no gesture toward her previous fame.

The things that were to bring an end to everything were already happening.

We had been compromised.

The next morning, Miss Proper and the other leaders were arrested and taken to. Mint goes right to your head. Its leaves are pebbled leather. Time is the

stubborn memory of wood with a trace of clothes.

Sage has large, outstretched grey-green hands.

...