2021-01-02
57 分钟Chang-rae Lee joins Deborah Treisman to read and discuss “Coming Soon,” by Steven Millhauser, which appeared in a 2013 issue of the magazine. Lee’s sixth novel, “My Year Abroad,” will be published in February.
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 coming soon by Stephen Milhauser, which was published in the New Yorker in December of 2013.
As Levinson stepped onto his front walk, he noticed with surprise that Masowskis house across the street had grown larger and stretched out on both sides, almost to the property lines.
When he turned right and set off for town, he saw that the house of his neighbors, the Sandlers, was stucco instead of white shingle.
It all must have happened while he was away.
The story was chosen by Chang Ri Lihd, whose 6th novel, my year abroad, will be published in February.
Hi, Cheng rae.
Hi, Debra.
Thank you for doing this again.
It's been a while, but it's my pleasure.
The last time you were on the podcast, you chose a story by Don DeLillo, and this time Stephen Milhouser.
And I feel as though both of those writers, it's not that they're similar in style, but they both tend to have a sort of conceptual nugget that they build the fiction around.
I wonder if you agree with that and if that's something that attracts you in fiction.
Yeah, absolutely.
And particularly with Stephen Milhauser, you know, maybe because he's written so many short stories, and conceptually, I think short stories, not that novels don't do this, but, you know, a short story because of its necessity for compression, for a certain kind of angled engagement, a certain conception of either in language or in form or in theme, usually a manager of all those things, it's advantaged by the form of the short story.
And with Milhauser, particularly, his stories, to me, have a certain kind of quiet acceleration to them, which, which I really love in fiction in certain fun ways.
It reminds me of certain stories of Brandon Carvers, although they're quite different.
But Stephen Milhauser's stories always have this, I think, wonderful bonding between character, language and setting, which all stories should have.