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

I'm Deborah Treasman, Fiction Editor at The New Yorker.

On this episode of The Writer's Voice, we'll hear Paul Ewan read his story, The New Coast,

from the November 10th 2025 issue of the magazine.

Yune is the author of five books of fiction, including the novels Run Me to Earth and Snowhunters,

which won the 2014 New York Public Library's Young Lions Fiction Award,

and the story collection, The Hive and the Honey, which was published in

2023.

Now here's Paul Yun.

The Next Coast

This happened after the war.

I was 12, almost 13.

My brother was five years older.

We had ended up in a small city in the center of the country, not too far from the western coast.

A train line had been rebuilt and was running, and that summer you could travel to the coast

if you had the money, it would take only a few hours. I think that was how it started, with

word spreading about the opening of the train line. Mrs. S. mentioned it one day. Have you heard,

she said, we have access to the coast. Then other people began

to imagine what the coast might look like these days, and we heard someone say, well, everything

must be new if they're letting us go there. Then someone else called it the new coast, and the name stuck. Not that any of us

could afford to see it ourselves, but it was something to talk about, to think about, those

new buildings, new rooms, the beach. We were all neighbors in one of the many settlements

...