Discuss “Safety”, by Joan Silber
Details
[We meet every Sunday after a new New Yorker magazine is published.]
Greetings, Fictioneers!
On Sunday, December 7th, 2025 at 4 pm CST/5 pm EST/3 pm MST/2 pm PST, on Zoom, we will discuss the New Yorker Fiction story from the issue dated December 8, 2025: “Safety”, by Joan Silber. Silber’s last New Yorker story was “Evolution”, in September 2022, that opens with a New York ten year-old experiencing a Manhattan emergency room.
- Read “Safety” at this link. Try a private or incognito window if blocked by the New Yorker's paywall or through the Libby app via your local public library “card”.
- Want to listen to it? Use the “Listen to this story” audio module on the story page (44 minutes at 1x speed) or at this link (46:03 with intro and ad(s)).
- An author interview, “Joan Silber on Friendship in a Fractured World” is at this link.
"Joan Silber (born 1945) is an American novelist and short story writer. She won the 2017 National Book Critics Circle Award in Fiction and the 2018 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction for her novel Improvement.
“Biography
“Joan Silber was born in 1945. She grew up in Millburn, New Jersey. She graduated from Sarah Lawrence College and obtained an M.A. from New York University. She taught at NYU and now teaches at Sarah Lawrence College and lives in New York City.
“Silber's work has been selected for The O. Henry Prize Stories six times—in 2003, 2004, 2007, 2013, 2015, and 2021. It also appeared in the Best American Short Stories 2015, and won The Pushcart Prize. Her writing has appeared in The New Yorker, Ploughshares, The Paris Review, Tin House, Epoch, The Southern Review, Agni, The Colorado Review, and other publications.”
- from Wikipedia English's Joan_Silber page , footnote marks and links removed.