Featured Podcast: New Yorker Fiction

The Concept:

A literary love-in of the grandest proportions. Writers who’ve been published in The New Yorker read stories from magazine’s archives written by their favourite authors. In the afterglow, fiction editor Deborah Treisman guides the guest through a Q and A. It’s the best English Lit class you’ve never taken.

Like The New Yorker itself, the Fiction Podcast is aspirational. You’ll come away imagining a future full of dinner parties on the Lower East Side, where you sit surveying the genius of your friends and children. It will remind you that you liked writing stories once, and should really pick that up again.

Episodes To Get You Started:

January 2013: Tony Earley reads William Maxwell

William Maxwell was fiction editor at the New Yorker from 1936 to 1975. His story Love, published towards the end of his career, was his way of saying “Look kids, this is how it’s done. This is the perfect short story.” Anyone interested in writing short fiction should listen and study the way Maxwell structures this piece.

December 2011: Tea Obreht reads Stephanie Vaughn

“I couldn’t eat or cut up my food while I was being spoken to. And I was always being spoken to.” Vaughn’s portrait of childhood on a military base on the US/Canadian border could be bleak. Instead, the young narrator guides us though the joys and adventures which accompany her father’s madness as he waits through the winter to be deployed. Obreht reads it the same way you would, without the theatrics of more experienced performers. Listening, I felt as though I were reading it at the Vaughn’s kitchen table.

November 2012: David Sedaris reads Miranda July

I read everything this man publishes. I even have his collection of short stories written from the perspective of animals. It isn’t great, but I’ve read it through. Miranda July is best known for the film You, Me And Everyone We Know and her latest email-based conceptual art. What the two writers have in common is their ability to point out the absurdity of anyone who tries to be normal. It’s a natural pairing that finds ease in the simple tale of a woman who meets a movie star on a plane.

February 2013: Francisco Goldman reads Roberto Bolano

“I don’t know why I fell in love with her but I did. A the start, the first days, the first hours it all went fine.” Bolano’s Clara is like a tragic High Fidelity, a young man’s inner monologue consumed by the one that got away. Goldman reads it with a knowing smile. You get the sense that he’s been there. We all have.

Best Enjoyed:

On a train through a misty mountain range. Or in the dead of night when everyone else in your neighbourhood is fast asleep.