Rivka Galchen Read Isaac Bashevis Singer

Rivka Galchen Read Isaac Bashevis歌手

The New Yorker: Fiction

小说

2016-01-04

1 小时 2 分钟
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单集简介 ...

Rivka Galchen joins Deborah Treisman to read and discuss Isaac Bashevis Singer's "The Cafeteria," from a 1968 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 Isaac Becheva's singer's story the Cafeteria, which was published in the New Yorker in 1968.

  • Almost every day on my walk after lunch, I pass the funeral parlor that waits for us and all our ambitions and illusions.

  • Sometimes I imagine that the funeral parlor is also a kind of cafeteria where one gets a quick eulogy or cottage on the way to eternity.

  • The story was chosen by Rivka Galchin, who is the author of the novel atmospheric disturbances and the story collection American Innovations.

  • She's been publishing fiction in the New Yorker since 2008.

  • Hi, Rivka.

  • Hi, Deborah.

  • Now, you were on the podcast in 2010, and at that point you chose a story by Leonard Michaels.

  • This time you've picked Isaac Bushev as singer.

  • And I wonder if there is for you any continuity between those two writers.

  • You know, it's interesting because I myself was reflecting on that because they're both sort of male jewish writers, and I hadn't really done that on purpose, but I was thinking on a deeper level what the continuity might be.

  • And there is a way in which they're both kind of comic writers.

  • Ib singer is, in this story in particular, much more punchliney than I think of Leonard Michaels ever being.

  • But I feel that they both, I call it the Seinfeld Tolstoy continuum, where you can sort of see that in some way, like the joke is a pretty good vessel for history tragedy.

  • It kind of, in a weird way, can contain it in a certain way.

  • And I think they're both writers who work along that line and follow, for lack of a better term, a kind of neurotic habit or a quirky worldview or way of being.

  • And mine it a little bit and show that it has depth and isn't just like a surface quirkiness.