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 Lauren Groff read her story Under the Wave

from the July 9th and 16th, 2018 issue of the magazine.

Groff has published three novels, including Arcadia in 2012 and Fates and Furies in 2015.

Her second story collection, Florida, came out last month. Now here's Lauren Groff.

Under the Wave.

It came up through the ground in the night.

The worst things never wait for sunrise.

She had soothed the bad dream from her little sun

until he breathed smoothly in the dark

and then crossed the floors to the bed and climbed

in without brushing the sand from her feet. The house sat alone in the marsh. They couldn't

afford the beach a mile away, and so their consolation was the birds. The great herons,

the cormorants, the lit candles of ibis. As she drifted off, she thought of the birds

sleeping out in their nests, although by then they were no longer there. They'd already fled.

She was almost asleep when she felt a great tongue licking the edges of her body, and she opened

her eyes to see a bloom of black,

her husband's face in a silent shout already moving away, underwater.

And all was stripped from her, and all she was was wildness and pain, and her lungs bursting

in the cage of her chest, and her body battered by a

hundred invisibilities and the terrible swirl. Out of the wildness the branch of an

...