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 a story by Frank O'Connor, the masculine principle, which was published in the New Yorker in 1950.
You may be engaged to me, but you're going to marry my Daev.
I might do worse, replied Jim in his stolid way.
Wait till he comes to live with us, said Fanny.
He's too interested in that house to be healthy.
The story was chosen by Anne Enwright, the first fiction laureate of Ireland, whose most recent novel, the Green Road, came out last year.
She's been publishing fiction in the New Yorker since 2000.
Hi, Anne.
Hi.
Hi.
So when we talked about this, you had just finished writing an essay on Maeve Brennan and you were going back and forth as to whether you wanted to read a Brennan story or a Frank O'Connor story.
What was at the root of that decision?
I think I chose the Frank O'Connor not as a writer but as a reader.
You know, Maeve Brennan, there's been a great and wonderful project of reclamation where we're looking again at her work.
But I read Frank O'Connor as a child, and Frank O'Connor is inside my head.
I find it very difficult to stand outside of his work.
I chose this story because it's good fun and because it reads so easily.