This is The Writers Voice, New Fiction from the New Yorker.

I'm Deborah Treisman 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 Grave Digger'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,

or 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 a hundred 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.

...