Kate Walbert Reads Stuart Dybek

凯特·沃尔伯特(Kate Walbert)阅读Stuart Dybek

The New Yorker: Fiction

小说

2018-08-02

38 分钟
PDF

单集简介 ...

Kate Walbert joins Deborah Treisman to read and discuss “Pet Milk,” by Stuart Dybek, from a 1984 issue of the magazine.

单集文稿 ...

  • 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 pet Milk by Stuart Diebeck, which was published in the New Yorker in August of 1984.

  • The radio turned low, played constantly.

  • Its top was warped and turning amber on the side where the tubes were.

  • I remember the sound of it on winter afternoons after school as I sat by her table watching the pet milk swirl and cloud in the steaming coffee.

  • The story was chosen by Kate Wahlberg, who's the author of six books of fiction, including the novel's a short History of Women, the Sunken Cathedral, and his favorites, which comes out this month.

  • Hi, Kate.

  • Hi, Deborah.

  • So you chose a story by Stuart Dybek to read today as his.

  • Has writing been important to you in your own career or life?

  • Well, this story in particular has been important to me.

  • I remember I first read it in the O.

  • Henry Prize stories.

  • It was in the anthology in 1986.

  • And I was just struck by the fact that Dybek had created a story out of what felt like a series of images as opposed to, you know, a complicated plot, and that the power of the images and the resonance and the repetition led to a kind of music in the story.

  • It was so lyrical and poetic.

  • So it was a revelation to me that stories could be made this way.

  • It felt like a kind of perfectly constructed story.