The author joins Deborah Treisman to read and discuss the story “1=1,” which was published in a 2016 issue of The New Yorker.
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 one equals one by Ann Carson, which appeared in the New Yorker in January of 2016.
Every water has a right place to be, but that place is in motion.
You have to keep finding it, keep having it find you.
The story was chosen by Teju Cole, whose novels include Open City and Tremor, which was published this year.
Hi, Teju.
Hello, Deborah.
Anne Carson is best known as a poet, a classicist, a translator.
Have you been a fan of her poetry and her translations as well?
Yes, I'm a big fan of her work, and I think rereading the story and thinking about it now alerts me to not just the fact that she does interesting things within the genres that she works in, but that she's really dissolving genres so that to even think of myself as a fan of her poetry, a fan of her translations, what I'm a fan of is what she does, and there is a continuity in what she does.
So this doesn't feel other to the body of her work.
Even though it's published as fiction, it's perhaps many things in one.
That's right, as is everything else that she does.
So I count myself a fan.
So there's continuity.
One equals one was the first piece of fiction by her that we ran in the magazine.
We've since run other pieces.
What made you choose this particular story?