This week we get The New Yorker‘s annual fiction issues, and the first story up is a never before published story E.L. Doctorow wrote in the 1950s when Doctorow was in his 20s: “The Drummer Boy on Independence Day.” The magazine says that this story was found by his biographer, Bruce Weber. Will it be any good? I don’t know! But it is short, so let’s see. Here is how it starts:

In our town, as in most, we celebrated the Fourth of July with a parade around the square and a few speeches from the steps of City Hall. An indispensable part of the ceremony, of course, was the Civil War veteran, and at the time I’m telling about we still had one — a Confederate, naturally, an old man of bone and leather named John Sewetti. John had been a drummer boy with T.J. Jackson and was thought to have seen most of what happened in the Shenandoah Valley. But he never spoke about his experiences, and he must have been a hundred and two years old before he finally agreed to lead an Independence Day parade.

I think that’s a compelling start! Please feel free to comment below. The other three stories in this week’s magazine have their own posts which I’ll link to here:

• “Kaho,” by Haruki Murakami
• “Opening Theory,” by Sally Rooney
• “The Hadal Zone,” by Annie Proulx