This is The Writer's Voice, new fiction from The New Yorker.

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

On this episode of The Writer's Voice, we'll hear Anne Enright read her story, The Hotel,

from the November 6th, 2017 issue of the magazine.

Enright has published three short story collections and six novels,

including the gathering, which won the Man Booker Prize in 2007,

and the Green Road, which came out in 2015.

Now here's Anne Enright.

The Hotel By that time, she had flown from Dublin to New York,

then over to Milan for a disastrous day,

followed by a long trot down to gate D9,

where nothing was happening.

There were no passengers.

Just a lone, slightly accusatory woman in uniform

who said that the flight had been cancelled since yesterday

and she would have to root through and hear her mind went blank

the way you blank on the name of a person at a party,

although some part of her brain must have known because she turned and walked back the way

she'd come, past the Segafredo franchise, the swatch counter, past two Italian men

shopping for sunglasses at a little spinning stand, down to the new gate, the number of which

was circled on her new boarding pass. And it must have been noted somewhere this

layover in Germany or Switzerland or Austria. The signs when she arrived were all in German.

...