After a near-fatal stabbing—and decades of threats—the novelist speaks about writing as a death-defying act.

The longest and most wide-ranging interview that the great Brazilian author gave, here translated and published for the first time.

From 1995, the author answers the age-old question in a series of five subjects: a film, a fall, a storm, a note, and a game.

“It was a terrible kiss, shockingly bad; Margot had trouble believing that a grown man could possibly be so bad at kissing.”

Hudson reads and discusses “The Frog Prince,” from a 2014 issue of the magazine.

“Our families had a falling out. . . . Yet we were still intimately bound up with each other.”

“Mama, we need to drive, my mother said. We need to drive now. We need to go.”

“If my little sister really did disappear in the hole, never to return to this world, how would I ever explain that to my parents?”

“She was breathless, as though she had no idea where to start among all the things we had to talk about.”

“At what point did his relations with Pauline begin to violate the ordinary rules of social contact? It started normally enough. Or did it?”

“This little piazza in this little town contains a sage of such profundity that he can resolve all your disagreements on the spot.”

Fiction by Lauren Groff: “He got out of the car, closing his door quietly, and crept through the woods toward the brick house.”

“In Maury’s car, or out on the grass under the stars, she was willing. And Maury was ready, but not willing.”

“Although I might prefer to somehow avoid acknowledging it, this is, above all and in every sense, a love story.”

Fiction by Anthony Veasna So: “Right now the only things Kayley truly knows are: she is a child; her sister is not quite an adult; and they are betraying their mother’s wishes.”

“The girl put her food on the floor, and lifted her mother. She was a skin bag with chalk in it, far too light to be human.”

Fiction: “Early morning: They deliver my father’s corpse in the trunk of a ’49 Mercury coupe, dew still heavy on the taillights.”

“Sometimes the irony is so great that the irony turns into cherry pie: I met Allie on the first day of Native American Heritage Month.”

The author reads his story from the February 10, 2020, issue of the magazine.

The author discusses “Our Lady of the Quarry,” her story from this week’s issue of the magazine.

What stands out in Ernest Hemingway’s short stories is their humanity, their feeling for human fragility.

“Without saying a word to each other we know that, if we chose to, we could venture into something reckless.”

When I first read “Madame Bovary,” at the age of fourteen, it left bruises that haven’t faded.

The author discusses her novella “What’s the Time, Mr. Wolf?”

“He was tormented now by his own happiness. He could not imagine a future day without Katherine.”

“Dylan Judge was from Ballina town. He was what you would call ‘known to the police.’ ”

“At practice, Noemi had been taking turns kicking our asses for weeks. We were not good.”

Before her lunch with Eddie Walsh, she writes: When did you last spend time alone with a woman who is not your wife?

“The Great Hair Crisis was raging on with no visible end.”

An excerpt from Coates’s début novel, “The Water Dancer”: “I was fresh out of Virginia, fresh out of the pit, my remarkable escape still alive in my mind.”

“The wretched mother could easily have lost her sanity watching her husband love their daugh­ter.”

“He was clearly hallucinating, agitated, imagining he was a prisoner of war; that was what it must have felt like to him—the cruel isolation, the medicine, the lights, the strange machines all...

The author reads his story from the November 9, 2020, issue of the magazine.

Fiction by Mary Gaitskill: “At first, the suit was not against me but against the publishing house, and all she wanted was a payment, which the company was prepared to make—as long as she kept quiet...

The masterful fiction writer has died, at the age of eighty-eight. Here’s a look at some of his many short stories in The New Yorker.

“He knows that there is nothing wrong with this woman—she’s simply dying.”

The author discusses “Unread Messages,” her story from the latest issue of the magazine.

The winner of the New Yorker Fiction Podcast anniversary contest.

“I don’t deny there was wrongdoing. I stole a life, and I don’t intend to give it back.”

“Suddenly the world has wrapped itself around her, embraced her house with music and laughter. The world is here. And she feels she should say hello.”

“Alice, she said, am I going to have to live in the real world one day? Without looking up, Alice snorted and said, Jesus, no, absolutely not.”

Her father said that he loved her—he just wasn’t going to leave her the beach house, which to him had become not the beach house at all but, in truth, something else entirely.

With each reading, some forgotten facet of Woolf’s novel comes to light.

Fiction by Zadie Smith: “Not only is there no more Eleanora, there isn’t any Billie, either. There is only Lady Day.”

“Lincoln in the Bardo,” the writer’s first foray into longer fiction, is a stunning depiction of the sixteenth President’s psyche.

“What was he? A sixty-two-year-old bachelor. With a wife.”

“ ‘There’s nothing worth getting in this world that you can get easily,’ the old man had said, with unshakable conviction, like Pythagoras explaining his theorem.”

“We are on vacation, from life and from struggle both. We are ‘going with the flow.’ ”

Theroux discusses his novella “The Vanishing Point,” about a well-intentioned carpenter who takes pride in what he does but at the same time seems almost completely ambitionless.

The New Yorker fiction editor reads and discusses “Good People,” by David Foster Wallace, from a 2007 issue of the magazine.

The author discusses “The Wind Cave,” his short story from this week’s issue of the magazine.

“Dad was encouraged to flirt with women at the gym. Harmless flirting. Talking and smiling and being friendly, being nice. Leave the rest up to the imagination.”

Working with the author, who has died, at ninety-two, was both a thrill and a lesson in intentionality.

The writer joins Deborah Treisman to read and discuss “Ibn Hakkan Al-Bokhari, Dead in his Labyrinth,” by Jorge Luis Borges, from a 1970 issue of the magazine.

“He didn’t realize, he says, how serious they were.”

“You should update your superiors. You should advise them to abort the operation. But you won’t. Not now.”

The writer discusses “The Lazy River,” her short story in this week’s issue of the magazine.

Fiction by George Saunders: “What would you have done? I know what you will say: you would have fought. But how? How would you have fought?”

Fiction: “Ogechi tried to think of it as a fair trade, a little bit of her life for her child’s life.”

Lorrie Moore reads and discusses the short story “Naked Ladies,” by Antonya Nelson.

Photographing a complicated year.

“Never have I felt being me to be so worth it so far.”

“It happened in an apartment, on an old couch. I wasn’t directed so much as given a series of props to make my way through, like an obstacle course.”

To read the late writer’s work was to behold his singular style.

“After just a few hours, it’s as if they’d always lived here. The things they’ve brought for a week in the country are scattered all over the place.”

The author joins Deborah Treisman to discuss the story “So Late in the Day,” which was published in a 2022 issue of the magazine.

The author discusses “The Middle Voice,” her story from the latest issue of the magazine.