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

I'm Deborah Trisman Fiction Editor at The New Yorker.

On this episode of The Writer's Voice, we'll hear Kieran Desai read her story, An Unashamed Proposal,

from the August 11th, 2025 issue of the magazine.

Desai is the author of the novel's Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard, and The Inheritance of Loss, which won the Man Booker Prize in 2006.

A new novel, The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, from which this story was adapted,

will be published this fall. Now here's Kieran Desai.

An Unashamed Proposal.

One gusty day in May of 1997, a mailman trudged down the streets of Fort Green in Brooklyn

and plucked a letter from his bag.

It almost flew from his hands, but it didn't, and he dropped it through the stiff brass

mail slot of a sober liver-colored brownstone,

readily on the dull parquet, until Lou Orsini, who'd lived forever on the second floor,

scooped it up, almost tossed it out with the panda garden delivery menus, but didn't.

He saw it in time and propped it on the stairs. When Ulla and

Sani returned from the Korean deli with toilet paper, tofu, sprouts, and six assorted artisan

ails, Ola almost trod on it, but didn't. She made pincers of her fingers and picked it up, despite her hands being full.

Ula was the girlfriend Sunny had never happened to mention to his family, although for more than a

year now they had shared a lease, a bed, a Con Ed utility bill, a laundry basket, and on some

absent-minded occasions, a toothbrush.

"'What does your mother say?' Ola asked, and lacing her sneakers.

Sunny would come to regret not bundling the letter away, but in this moment it was so astonishing

...