The New Yorker: Fiction · The New Yorker
George Saunders Reads Claire Keegan
July 1, 2023·1 hr 11 min·5 clips
George Saunders reveals how Claire Keegan's story withholds its central truth to mirror the character's denial.
As heard by us
Saunders reads Keegan with quiet force, letting one conversation expose the habits Cahill has never had to examine.
George Saunders's reading of Clare Keegan's "So Late in the Day" gives a quiet scene the charge of reckoning. Cahill is not confronted by spectacle but by an ordinary question, pressed across a table: what does he want from women? His answer, or lack of one, is the damage.
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