2018-11-02
1 小时 6 分钟Stuart Dybek joins Deborah Treisman to read and discuss "Miracle Polish," by Steven Millhauser, from a 2011 issue of the magazine. Dybek is a poet and fiction writer, whose story collections include "Paper Lantern: Love Stories" and "Ecstatic Cahoots: Fifty Short Stories." He was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 2007.
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 miracle polish by Stephen Milhauser, which was published in the New Yorker in November of 2011.
If the Polish had made me look younger, if it had made me handsome, if it had smoothed my skin and fixed my teeth and changed the shape of my nose, I'd have known it was some horrible mechanical trick.
The story was chosen by Stuart Diebeck, a poet and fiction writer whose story collections include paper lantern love stories and ecstatic cahoots.
50 short stories.
Hi, Stuart.
Hi, Deborah.
So what is it that most draws you to Stephen Milhauser's work?
Well, I'm attracted to the kind of fabulous world that he creates.
I have a special fondness for writers working that dimension of fiction.
But the other thing that I really love about his work is just the sheer beauty of his writing.
He's got all the tools.
You mentioned to me that you had been teaching this story miracle polish in a class on writing fabulism.
Correct.
When I saw it in the New Yorker, I gobbled it up and put it in my course pack and it stayed there.
I mean, I rotate the stories, but that one has remained.
How do you define fabulism?
Not the way I would if this was a scholarly discussion, but for the class, I describe it as anything that's not realism, really.