A teen girl gets groped at summer camp and her mother picks her up for a day together. The results are a lot of questioning of the incident and how her relationship reflects the experience. Was she embarrassed or was her mother embarrassed for her? By the end, she’s changed from the experience, but not just because of the physical pain of the experience, but also because of how her mother reacted to it. How she was perceived in the moment.

Author

Adam Levine

Publication

The New Yorker, April 21, 2025

A middle aged man had an affair with a twenty year old. The story takes place on a weekday excursion for privacy and intimacy that turns sour.

Author

Joyce Carol Oates

Publication

The New Yorker, March 24, 2025

Date Read

March 21, 2025

A love story taking place online where the male narrator finds a woman he enjoys her presence online, but never meets her, so he travels to Paris to find her. But he encounters only the place where she used to write and the knowledge that she published his short story in the local French magazine. At the end, it seems the woman he went to meet was his mother, but it was vague. Translated from Chinese.

Author

Shang Xuetao

Publication

The New Yorker, December 2, 2024

Date Read

January 16, 2025

An Indian boy grows old enough to partake in the family real estate business. He’s unhappy there, though, and finds love with a girl who works in the floor above them. They go on to live a short happy marriage, where they have a child, who we find at the end narrates the story. A quick love story that’s full of superstition.

Author

Kanak Kapur

Publication

The New Yorker, January 13, 2025

Date Read

January 13, 2025

A young man works on his Oxford final papers and has conversations with Petra, a friend whose banker father has bad luck, but it’s more about his decision to ask for help and perform to his abilities.

Author

Daisy Hildyard

Publication

The New Yorker, December 23, 2024

Date Read

December 27, 2024