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 Charles Yu read his story, Fable, from the May 30th, 2016 issue of the magazine.

You is the author of two-story collections and one novel,

How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe.

This is his first story in the magazine.

Now here's Charles Hugh.

Fable. Once upon a time

there was a man

whose therapist thought it would be a good idea for the man

to work through some stuff

by telling a story about that stuff.

The man lived in a one-bedroom

efficiency cottage, all by himself, in a sort of dicey part of town.

One day, the man woke up and realized that this was pretty much it for him. It wasn't terrible,

but it wasn't great, either, and not likely to improve. The man was smart enough to realize this,

yet not quite smart enough, to do anything

about it. He lived out the rest of his days, and eventually died. The end. Happy now?

The man could see that his therapist was not amused. A rather unsatisfactory ending,

the therapist opined and suggested that

the man could do better. The man thought, is she really serious about this? But he didn't say

anything out loud. The man was not convinced that he needed to be talking to the therapist at all.

...