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 Rachel Kushner read her story, Stanville,

from the February 12th and 19th, 2018 issue of the magazine.

Kushner has published two novels, Telex from Cuba and the Flame Throers, both of which

were finalists for the National Book Award. Her third novel, The Mars Room, from which

this story was adapted, will be published in May. Now here's Rachel Kushner.

Stanville. If his students could learn to think well, to enjoy reading books, some part of them would be uncaged.

That was what Gordon Hauser told himself and what he told them, too.

But there were days, like when a woman walked into the prison classroom and flung

boiling sugar water into the face of another woman when he did not believe it. There were days when it

seemed as though the real purpose of the work he was doing was to destroy his own life by trying to

teach people who wanted to burn each other's faces off.

The guards made everything more difficult with their contempt for the women and their hostility toward free-world staff like Gordon.

The guards had been forced to undergo sensitivity training and were furious about it.

It's because you cunts cry and demand explanations,

they said. Everything with you bitches is why, why, why? They all reminisced about better times

when they had worked in men's facilities where they'd observed high blood volume stabbings on

closed circuit monitors

from the safety of the watch office,

and dealt with prisoners who lived by strictly self-enforced convict codes.

Female prisoners bickered with the guards and contested everything,

...