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

I'm Debra Treesman, fiction editor at The New Yorker.

On this episode of The Author's Voice, we'll hear Colin Barrett read his story, Anne Hedonia,

Here I Come, from the April 18, 2016 issue of the magazine.

Barrett is the author of the story collection Young Skins, which won the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award and the Guardian First Book Award in 2014.

Now here's Colin Barrett.

An Hedonia, here I come.

Bobby Talas possessed the drainpipe physique, knee-length Macintosh, and winsomely dissolute

demeanor of a poet, or so he believed as he pursued a lavishly wayward course across the

Mangee municipal parks, median strips, and depressed residential

quadrangles of his quarter of the city on another blustery October afternoon.

One hand broodingly in sconce within a pocket, Bobby smoked as he walked and made rapid

furtive motions with his lips as if having an intense, collusive conversation with himself, which is exactly

what he was doing. Bobby was a poet. He lived in a dilapidated apartment block on the southside

inner city, a block so populated with retirees and pensioners that visitors of which Bobby had

absolutely none, often mistook it for a state retirement home.

Bobby was certain he was the only resident under the age of 60.

The blocks corridors, the sour cream walls, lit by low-wadded sconces, downy with dust,

furred, blue, perpetually damp carpeting, in which shootprint impressions dolefully lingered, evoked

for Bobby a budget version of the afterlife. It was at least a peaceful place, no noise,

but the late-night dysphagic groans of the elevator's recurringly jammed doors. Bobby walked

six miles every day.

...