Akhil Sharma Reads Jeffrey Eugenides

Akhil Sharma阅读Jeffrey Eugenides

The New Yorker: Fiction

小说

2017-08-01

56 分钟
PDF

单集简介 ...

Akhil Sharma reads and discusses “Baster,” by Jeffrey Eugenides.

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 Baster by Jeffrey Eugenides, which was published in the New Yorker in June of 1996.

  • Plan B was more devious and inspired, less romantic, more solitary, sadder, but braver too.

  • The story was chosen by Akhil Sharma, who is the author of two novels and the story collection a Life of Adventure and Delight, which was published last month.

  • Hi, Akil.

  • Hi, Debra.

  • Now, the last time that you were on the podcast, you chose a story by Tobias Wolf.

  • This time you've chosen Geoffrey Eugenides.

  • Do you think that there's any consistency in your choices, or are you choosing for different reasons?

  • The writing is enormously energetic in both of them, the way that the type of energy is different, but the intensity level is enormously high.

  • And is that what most draws you into a short story?

  • It is not what most draws me in, but it is something that can catch me and capture me.

  • Once you read sentences like the ones in this story or in Tobias Woolf's, it's hard to get out of them.

  • This story came out in 1996.

  • Did you read it back then?

  • I'm not sure when I read it, but not when it came out.

  • It's interesting to read it now because I think when I read it, I read it much more as a comedy, and now I read it as a tragedy.

  • Oh, dear.