2018-06-02
1 小时 8 分钟A.M. Homes joins Deborah Treisman to read and discuss "Stone Mattress," from a 2011 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 stone mattress by Margaret Atwood, which was published in the New Yorker in December of 2011.
At the outset, Verna had not intended to kill anyone.
What she had in mind was a vacation, pure and simple.
Take a breather, do some inner accounting, shed worn skin.
The story was chosen by Am Holmes, who's the author of ten books of fiction, including the story collection days of Awe, which comes out this month.
Hi, am.
Hi, Debra.
So last time you were on the podcast, you read the lottery by Shirley Jackson and one of the darkest stories of the last century.
This time, you've chosen another dark story by Margaret Atwood.
Do you think that these two stories appeal to you for the same reasons?
You know, it's interesting.
I hadn't thought about it in that sense, but I would say they appeal to a kind of darkness that often goes unspoken, that I think is in the culture, as opposed to, say, in me personally.
So, yeah, I think that there is that, that thread of trying to figure out how one illustrates this kind of darkness in fiction.
A sort of internal murderousness.
Yeah.
Or a kind of a moral situation that is unresolved.
Right.