Discuss “Risk, Discipline” by Andrew Martin

[We meet every Sunday after a new New Yorker magazine is published.]

Greetings, Fictioneers!

On Sunday, December 21th, 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 22, 2025: “Risk, Discipline” by Andrew Martin. His prior New Yorker piece was an essay about his own life choices, “‘MFA vs NYC’: Both, Probably”, in 2014.

1. Read “Risk, Discipline” 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”.
2. Want to listen to it? Use the “Listen to this story” audio module on the story page (40 minutes at 1x speed) or at this link (41:23 with intro and ad(s)).
3. An author interview, “Andrew Martin on the Post-Lockdown Period” is at this link.

"Andrew Martin (born 6 July 1962) is an English journalist, rail historian, crime novelist, and writer of fiction and non-fiction. He is the author of more than 30 books, many about railways. He is also a broadcaster, and writes a Substack, “Reading on Trains”.
“Martin was brought up in Yorkshire, studied at Merton College, Oxford, and qualified as a barrister. He began working as a journalist, and his first novel, Bilton, a satire on journalism, appeared in 1999. It was followed in 2001 by 'The Bobby Dazzlers', about a gang of burglars in York.The Guardian said that Bilton and The Bobby Dazzlers "rank high in the lists of the best comic novels published in the past 10 years".
“His series of detective novels about Jim Stringer, a railwayman reassigned to the North Eastern Railway police in Edwardian England, includes The Necropolis Railway (set on the London Necropolis Railway), The Blackpool Highflyer, The Lost Luggage Porter, Murder at Deviation Junction, Death on a Branch Line, The Last Train to Scarborough, The Somme Stations (Winner of the Crime Writers' Association Ellis Peters Historical Award 2011), The Baghdad Railway Club, Night Train to Jamalpur and Powder Smoke.
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“He has written non-fiction. Railway-related titles include Underground Overground, A Passenger's History of the Tube; Belles and Whistles, Five Journeys Through Time on Britain's Trains and Night Trains, The Rise and Fall of the Sleeper.
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“He is the editor of a dictionary of humorous quotations: Funny You Should Say That: A Compendium of Jokes, Quips and Quotations from Cicero to the Simpsons.
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"Martin writes and performs music under the name Brunswick Green.
Martin lives in north London with his wife and sons.”
- from Wikipedia English's Andrew_Martin_(novelist) page , footnote marks and links removed.