This is The Author's Voice, New Fiction from The New Yorker.

I'm Deborah Treesman, Fiction Editor at The New Yorker.

On this episode of The Author's Voice, we'll hear Ben Lerner read his story, The Polish Writer,

from the June 6th-13th, 2016 issue of the magazine.

Lerner is the author of the novels leaving the Atotia Station, Nteno4, and three books of poetry.

He's a 2015 MacArthur Fellow. Now here's Ben Lerner.

The Polish writer.

The show is up, installation complete.

The opening was the next night.

She'd fought her last obligatory battles with her gallerist, Elena, about placement and press release.

They'd made up over a drink. She'd taken an Uber she couldn't afford from Chelsea back to the Lower East Side apartment she couldn't afford to get

some sleep, only to realize just as she'd drifted off into the dream in which her mentor,

Katrine, arrives unannounced from Krakow, Barry knew Sonia always wakes before she can receive

that she'd made a terrible mistake. She had been wrong to concede what it had first seemed a minor

point, that the paint on the sides of two of the ten canvases, incidental flex and smudges,

would remain, whereas all the other sides had been cleaned up, overpainted white.

Elena thought the little traces of production contrasted nicely with the general immaculacy of the

paintings, that this emphasized their handmade quality, and Sonia exhausted, it said, fine,

so long as Elena agreed to hang them at the unusual

height Sonia preferred.

Agreed.

But now Sonia, jumping out of the bed, she barely slept in for a week, struggling into

...