By Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

After his second heart attack, the judge knew that he could no longer put off informing his wife about the contents of his will. He did this for the sake of the woman he had been keeping for twenty-five years, who, ever since his first attack, had been agitating about provisions for her future. These had long been in place in his will, known only to the lawyer who had drawn it up, but it was intolerable to the judge to think that their execution would be in the hands of his family; that is, his wife and son. Not because he expected them to make trouble but because they were both too impractical, too light-minded to carry out his wishes once he was not there to enforce them.

This suspicion was confirmed for him by the way Binny received his secret. Any normal wife, he thought, would have been aghast to learn of her husband’s long-standing adultery. But Binny reacted as though she had just heard some spicy piece of gossip. She was pouring his tea and, quivering with excitement, spilled some in the saucer. He turned his face from her. “Go away,” he told her, and then became more exasperated by the eagerness with which she hurried off to reveal the secret to their son…

Continue reading “The Judge’s Will,” new fiction featured in this week’s issue: http://nyr.kr/16pRD3V

Photograph by Chiara Goia.

(Source: newyorker.com)

Read Jhumpa Lahiri’s story “Year’s End,” a short story about an Indian-American college student meeting his stepmother and stepsisters who have moved to the United States from India: http://nyr.kr/WVDlSD

Cressida Leyshon talks to Thomas Pierce, whose story “Shirley Temple Three,” appears in this week’s issue: http://nyr.kr/VKUFXQ

New fiction by Steven Millhauser, featured in this week’s issue: http://nyr.kr/YrwMLa

New fiction in this week’s issue from Nobel Prize-winner, Mo Yan.

D.T. Max on “Wickedness,” an unfinished story about the Internet from around 2000, now part of the newly opened Pale King boxes in the David Foster Wallace papers at the Ransom Center: http://nyr.kr/STG2FW

Read “The Semplica-Girl Diaries,” new fiction from George Saunders in this week’s issue: http://nyr.kr/UG4tT6

When Marina Keegan died, tragically, at the age of twenty-two, in a car accident in May, she had just graduated from Yale University and was about to start a job on the editorial staff of The New Yorker. (She had interned in the magazine’s fiction department last summer.) She was also at the beginning of a promising career as a writer—of plays (one of which, “Independents,” was recently staged at the New York Fringe Festival), of journalism, and of fiction. That Marina was already exceptional in her accomplishments was made clear by the multitude of tributes and public expressions of grief that followed her death. It is also clear in the too-small body of writing she left behind, which offers a tantalizing taste of a literary voice still in development, yet already imbued with unusual insight, nuance, humor, and sensitivity. Her story “Cold Pastoral,” in which a college student is forced to reassess her relationship and herself when she reads her boyfriend’s diary after his death, has a skillfully controlled comedy to it: “A lot of time was spent being consciously romantic,” the narrator says. “Making sushi, walking places, waiting too long before responding to texts. I fluctuated between adding songs to his playlist and wondering if I should stop hooking up with people I was eighty per cent into and finally spend some time alone.” At the same time, it shows an acute, almost clinical understanding of the mixture of arrogance and vulnerability, of pretense and emotion, with which its twenty-something characters pursue and evade real attachment. It is published here for the first time.

—Deborah Treisman. Click-through to read Keegan’s story, “Cold Pastoral”

Read “Fischer vs. Spassky,” fiction from this week’s issue by Lara Vapnyar.

Here, Fiction Editor Deborah Treisman discusses Vapnyar’s story with her. 

Read “Amundsen,” new fiction by Alice Munro in this week’s issue: http://nyr.kr/R4MqaB