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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 Saeed Sarah Fazzade read his story, Process of Elimination, from the May 4th, 2026 issue of the magazine.

Sarah Fisade is the author of several plays, a memoir, and the story collection's brief encounters with the enemy and American Estrangement,

a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize, which was published in 2021.

Now here's Saeed Sarah Fazzade.

Process of Elimination Someone must have been telling lies about me because when I came in for my

shift this morning, I found out I was going to be fired for stealing the tip jar. That's what they're

saying, Melissa told me. Who's they? I asked. She didn't know. She was speaking under her breath, trying not to make eye

contact, trying to look busy arranging muffins in the display case while the video camera stared

down at us. It just so happened that exactly a month had passed since the tip jar had gone missing.

And next week, it would be a month since a terrorist attack at the Boston Marathon,

two states away, had killed three people and injured hundreds more. These events were, of course,

unrelated. What was not unrelated, at least for me, was that I shared the same first name by sheer

coincidence, with Tamerland Zaranev, who, along with his younger brother,

had carried out the deadly bombing.

Other than the name, though, we had nothing whatsoever in common,

including the fact that he had been born in the Soviet Union

and pronounced dead in a Boston hospital after a four-day manhunt, while I, Tamerland Thompson,

...