Discuss “The Welfare State” by Nell Zink.

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

Greetings, Fictioneers!

On Sunday, December 28th, 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 29, 2025 & January 5, 2026: “The Welfare State” by Nell Zink. This is Zink’s first New Yorker piece.

1. Read “The Welfare State” 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 (28 minutes at 1x speed) or at this link (unclear length at the time of this posting).
3. An author interview, “Nell Zink on German and American Stereotypes” is at this link.

"Helen "Nell" Louise Zink (born 1964) is an American writer living in Germany. After being a long term penpal of Avner Shats, she came to prominence in her fifties with the help of Jonathan Franzen and her novel, Mislaid, was longlisted for the National Book Award. Her debut The Wallcreeper was released in the United States by the independent press Dorothy and named one of 100 notable books of 2014 by The New York Times, as was Mislaid. Zink then released Nicotine, Private Novelist and Doxology through Ecco Press. In 2022 she published Avalon, again a New York Times notable book, with Alfred A. Knopf. In 2025 she received a Guggenheim Fellowship.
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Personal life
Zink was born in California in 1964 and raised in rural Virginia, a setting she draws on in her novel Mislaid. She attended Stuart Hall School and the College of William and Mary, where she earned a B.A.

In 1993, while living in Hoboken, New Jersey, Zink founded a zine called Animal Review, which ran until 1997 and ‘featured submissions and interviews with punk musicians about their pets, from King Crimson guitarist Robert Fripp writing about his rabbit Beaton Bunnerius Bun, to Jon Langford, of British punk band The Mekons, discussing his loach fish.’ Zink has worked as a secretary at Colgate-Palmolive, and as a technical writer in Tel Aviv. She has worked in construction, waited tables and was a secretary before working as a translator. ‘There's never a market for true art,’ Zink told an interviewer from The Paris Review, ‘so my main concern was always to have a job that didn't require me to write or think.’”
- from Wikipedia English's Nell_Zink page , footnote marks and links removed.