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The New Yorker: Fiction · The New Yorker

Aleksandar Hemon Reads ZZ Packer

November 2, 2024·1 hr 17 min·5 clips
Hemon describes the shocking scene where two students wash each other in a filthy university dishroom.
Dina calls herself a revolver. Deborah Treisman opens with ZZ Packer's Drinking Coffee Elsewhere, which appeared in the magazine in June 2000. Aleksandar Hemon chose it with clear affection. He loves the story and the book, and he teaches it to students. Then the reading takes over. The excerpt drops into Dina's session with Dr. Rayburn, where every ordinary question seems to press on something she would rather not touch. She scans the couch for something she might pawn. When he asks what happened next, she makes up a walk home, a stop at a boy's house, and a kiss. Dr. Rayburn does not buy it. His cigarette feels almost like a detective's tool, turning the room tense and airless. Dina keeps saying the kiss felt nice, but it lands more like cover than confession. The story lets the lie tighten around her without overexplaining it. After the session, she moves fast. Her fear that Dr. Rayburn might follow and pull the truth out of her shows how exposed she feels. A record player blocks her door. The Charles Mingus LP becomes the thing she can return to, again and again, until sleep finally comes. Sleep does not soften much. Dina dreams of her mother as memories of skin, bone, toenails, and a school lesson about whales arrive in sharp detail. The episode's frame stays calm, returning to Hemon's New Yorker history and the podcast archive, with the story placed carefully among other readings.

As heard by us

A sharp, patient reading of ZZ Packer's Dina, where campus alienation turns intimate and hard to shake.

ZZ Packer's "Drinking Coffee Elsewhere" arrives with its flint already showing: Dina introduces herself as a revolver, then spends the story slipping away from intimacy, authority, and memory.

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Why you'd press play

Aleksandar Hemon chose a story whose narrator says she would be a revolver.

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