Elif Batuman Reads Sylvia Townsend Warner

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• 00:05

  This is the New Yorker fiction podcast from the New Yorker magazine.

• 00:08

  I'm Deborah Treisman, fiction editor at the New Yorker.

• 00:11

  Each month we invite a writer to choose a story from the magazine's archives to read and discuss.

• 00:16

  This month, we're going to hear truth and fiction by Sylvia Townsend Warner, which was published in the New Yorker in December of 1961.

• 00:24

  Clive saw what the boy was looking at, a stranger carrying a bag.

• 00:30

  Of course that was the answer.

• 00:33

  He smiled at the boy, who did not return his smile, and walked back to the front door, mounted its pretentious steps, and pulled the bell handle.

• 00:43

  The story was chosen by Elif Baterman, whose most recent novel, either or, was published earlier this year.

• 00:49

  Hi, Elif.

• 00:50

  Hi, Deborah.

• 00:52

  So when I asked you to be a guest on the podcast, you went down a kind of rabbit hole of reading archival fiction that took you to many other writers before you landed on Sylvia Townsend Warner.

• 01:03

  So what led you to her?

• 01:06

  Well, I love archives, so I was just really enjoying poking around.

• 01:10

  And, you know, Sylvia Townsend Warner was on my radar as a writer who I was interested in reading more about.

• 01:18

  I don't know very much about her work at all.

• 01:20

  I guess I heard about her from friends who are really into her, mostly in England.

• 01:25

  And I just the fact that she was a lesbian and she lived with a woman her whole life, and she was a communist.

• 01:32

  Then I heard about summer will show when New York Review books reissued it.

• 01:36

  And it's a historical novel in the 1848 revolution.

• 01:41

  And it's about this woman who leaves her husband and then takes up with her husband's mistress and becomes politicized.

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