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 Kevin Barry read his story, The Coast of Latrim,

from the October 15th, 2018 issue of the magazine.

Barry is the author of two story collections.

There are Little Kingdoms and Dark Lies the Island,

as well as the novel's Beetlebone and City of Bohane,

for which he won the International Impact Dublin Literary Award.

Now here's Kevin Barry.

The Coast of Latrim.

Living alone in his dead uncle's cottage And with the burden lately of wandering thoughts in the night

Seamus Ferris had fallen hard for a Polish girl who worked at a cafe down in Carrick

He had himself almost convinced that the

situation had the dimensions of a love affair, though in fact he'd exchanged no more than a few

dozen words with her, whenever she named a price for his flat white and scone, and he shyly paid it,

offering a line or two himself on the

busyness of the town and the fineness of the weather. It's like France, he said to her,

one sunny morning in June. And it was true that the fields of the mountain had all the week

idled in what seemed a continental languor.

In the lower hills east were a Provenceal blue in the haze, and the lake when he lowered

himself into it was so warm by the evening it didn't even make his midge-bite sting.

The heat, he tried again, makes the place seem like France. We wouldn't be used to it.

...