2024-03-01
1 小时 14 分钟Greg Jackson joins Deborah Treisman to read and discuss “Safari,” by Jennifer Egan, which was published in The New Yorker in 2010. Jackson has published a story collection, “Prodigals,” and a novel “The Dimension of a Cave,” which was one of The New Yorker's Best Books of 2023. He has been publishing in the magazine since 2014.
This is the New Yorker fiction podcast from the New Yorker magazine.
I'm Deborah Treisman, fiction editor at the New Yorker.
Each month we invite a writer to choose a story from the magazine's archives to read and discuss.
This month we're going to hear Safari by Jennifer Egan, which appeared in the New Yorker in January of 2010.
Lou is one of those men whose restless charm has generated a contrail of personal upheaval that is practically visible behind him, two failed marriages and two more kids back home in LA who were too young to bring on this three week safari.
The story was chosen by Greg Jackson, who's the author of the story collection Prodigals and the novel Dimensions of a Cave, which came out in 2023.
Hi, Greg.
Hi, Deborah.
Welcome.
I want to start with Jennifer Egan's work in general.
Have you been a longtime fan?
You know, I was thinking about this, and I actually think this story was the first of her work that I read or encountered, and I remember reading it in the New Yorker the week it came out.
Possibly someone had recommended it to me, and possibly I just picked it up and read it.
I was so blown away.
I didn't know that it was going to be part of a novel or appear in slightly different form in a novel she wrote.
But that was my introduction to her work, and I think it was a great introduction because everything I've read since has had some of these same qualities of just the sort of brilliance and scope and poignancy.
There's something very moving about her work.
So this was where it began.
And, yeah, I am a big fan.
And what do you think it was on that first reading, when you say it had scope, what do you mean by that?