The Joy of Discomfort

The New Yorker published its first short story by Paul Theroux, “Acknowledgments,” in 1979. Since then, the magazine has published ten more of his stories, along with reported pieces on subjects such as the New York dominatrix Nurse Wolf and the handover of Hong Kong to China. What ties those pieces together is their interest in discomfort in all of its forms: political, social, sexual, physical, and spiritual.