Trevor is for me one of the absolute masters of the short story form. His stories always leave me with the feeling of having entered into, or stayed a while staring at, a particular kind of realist painting: where it’s all laid out before you, but the emotions are held just barely, and very neatly in check. This story is absolutely succinct, and so much larger than itself.
First published in The New Yorker, and available to read online here; collected in Last Stories, Viking Penguin, 2018
A Personal Anthology 