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

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

On this episode of The Author's Voice, we'll hear Ian McEwen read his story, My Purple

Scented Novel, from the March 28th, 2016 issue of the magazine.

McEwan is the author of three short story collections and 13 novels, including Amsterdam, Atonement,

and most recently The Children Act. He's been publishing fiction in The New Yorker since 1997.

Now here's Ian McEwan.

My Purple ScCented novel. You will have heard of my friend, the once celebrated novelist

Jocelyn Tarbert, but I suspect his memory is beginning to fade. Time can be ruthless

with reputation. The association

in your mind is probably with a half-forgotten scandal and disgrace. You'd never heard of me,

the once obscure novelist Parker Sparrow, until my name was publicly connected with his.

To a knowing few, our names remain rigidly attached, like the two

ends of a seesaw. His rise coincided with, though did not cause, my decline. Then his descent

was my earthly triumph. I don't deny there was wrongdoing. I stole a life, and I don't intend to give it back.

You may treat these few pages as a confession. To make it fully, I must go back 40 years

to a time when our lives happily and entirely overlapped and seemed poised to run in parallel

towards a shared future. We studied at the same

university, read the same subject, English literature, published our first stories in student

magazines with names like Knife in Your Eye. But what names are like that? We were ambitious.

We wanted to be writers, famous writers, even great writers. We took holidays together and read each other's stories, gave generous, savagely honest comments, made love to each other's girlfriends, and on a few occasions tried to interest ourselves in a homoerotic affair. I'm fat and bald now, but then I had a head of curls and was slender. I like to

think I resembled Shelley. Jocelyn was tall, blonde, muscular with a firm jawline, the very image of

...