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 Robert Koover read his story, The Hanging of the School Marm, from the November 28th, 2016 issue of the magazine.

Kuver is the author of ten novels, including the public burning, ghost town, and the Brunus Day of Rath.

A new novel, Huckout West, will be published in January.

Now here's Robert Cooper.

The Hanging of the school marm.

The school marm is playing poker in the town saloon.

The stake is the saloon itself.

As she's preparing to deal the cards, one of the men demands she cut the fucking deck,

and she shoots him from her lap. Sorry, but I simply

cannot allow. The others tip their crumpled hats. No, ma'am, you just go ahead and deal.

The men of the town find the school marm difficult, but are awed by her refined and lofty character and

generally do what she tells them to do the sheriff likes to say that she's as pure as a spotless

lily of the lake though they have no lake and there are no lilies in it, no damn lilies.

The men cuss a lot, in fact, all the time, but never around a schoolmarm.

Cussing doesn't go together with a schoolmarm.

It's like salting your coffee, to put it politely.

After winning the saloon in the poker hand,

the schoolmarm has the deceased removed and turns the card tables into school desks. The bar becomes an altar on Sundays, but there's no preacher, so the school marm provides temperance lectures from it,

which the men are obliged to attend. In their minds, it's still the old bar, the old saloon, so they carry along hip

blasts and beef jerky to ease them through the unholy teetium, belching and snorting

...