2017-11-01
54 分钟Lauren Groff joins Deborah Treisman to read and discuss Shirley Hazzard’s “In These Islands,” from a 1990 issue of the magazine.
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 in these islands by Shirley Hazard, which was published in the New Yorker in June of 1990.
In becoming a daughter, she had not relinquished personality.
She herself began now to be beautiful, the gray hair in a coil, the thoughtful brow and pliant wrist.
The story was chosen by Lauren Groff, who's published three novels, including most recently, Fates and Furies, which came out in 2015.
Hi, Lauren.
Hi.
So what is your history as a reader of Shirley Hazard?
How did you come to her work?
I have loved Shirley Hazard for many, many years.
The transit of Venus is my favorite of her books, and I think it's probably, probably one of the great books of the 20th century, and she just doesn't get read as often as I believe she should be.
All of her books are really good, but the transit of Venus just blows everything else out of the water.
And what is it about the transit of Venus?
She is so good at so many things.
I mean, I feel like she's the direct descendant of Henry James in some ways.
She writes very much about boiling passions underneath a lot of restraint.
She uses really long and sometimes abstract language, but it's always very clear and lucid.
She's able to write in terms of scale in a way that almost nobody is able to write.