| This weekend, an array of acclaimed actors, musicians, and thinkers will converge on Manhattan for The New Yorker Festival, the magazine’s annual celebration of culture and ideas. There will also, of course, be plenty of writers, both from the staff of The New Yorker and from the worlds of screenwriting and literature. Among them will be the author Emma Cline, whose most recent novel, “The Guest,” became a best-seller earlier this year. In 2019, the magazine published “What Can You Do With a General,” Cline’s short story about a family gathering at Christmas. As the holiday approaches, a pair of California baby boomers await their adult children, who arrive one by one with their baggage—but not all their luggage—in tow. Outwardly a low-key affair, the story is laced with intriguing hints about the family’s past, and studded with subtle provocations about parenting, perspective, memory, and denial. “How easily a veil dropped between him and this group of people,” the unreliable narrator thinks, about his own kin. “They fuzzed out, pleasantly, became vague enough that he could love them.” | 
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