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

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

On this episode of The Writer's Voice, we'll hear Joyce Carol Oates read her story,

Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, from the October 14th, 2019 issue of the magazine.

Oates is the author of more than 60 books of fiction, including the novels The Gravedigger's Daughter

and a Book of American Martyrs, and the story collection, Dear Husband.

Now here's Joyce Carroll Oates.

Sinners in the Hands of an angry God.

This matter of the face mask, for instance,

well, just a half mask, a green gauze mask,

of the kind that medical workers wear.

Not a full face mask, that would be ridiculous.

Even before the floods, landslides, and firestorms of the past several years, loose, sometimes, wore a gauze mask, not in public,

just at home, when it seemed to her that the wind smelled funny, smelled wrong. Especially from the south.

There are industrial cities to the south.

Her town, Hazleton on Hudson, is 100 miles from New York City, and far fewer from the notorious power plant with its majestic white plumes of poisonous smoke

that are sometimes visible to those who search the sky with binoculars whenever there is an air quality alert.

This mask acquired at a medical supply store, Luce hurriedly removes if Andrew returns home unexpectedly, for her husband disapproves of what he

calls her, overreacting, or catastrophizing. Is that even a word catastrophizing? Luce understands that

Andrew means to affect the comical tone, a sort of cartoon rhetoric, to soften the mockery

and the annoyance he so clearly feels.

Yet catastrophizing also acknowledges the very real, the surely imminent catastrophe.

...