Helen Simpson reads her story “Lub Dub Lub Dub Lub Dub,” from the September 7, 2026, issue of the magazine. A winner of the American Academy of Arts and Letters’s E. M. Forster Award, Simpson is the author of seven short-story collections, including “Four Bare Legs in a Bed,” which won the Somerset Maugham Award in 1990, and “Cockfosters,” which was published in 2025. 


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