2014-02-04
36 分钟T. C. Boyle reads two short stories by Donald Barthelme: “Game” and “The School.”
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 two very short stories by Donald Barthelme, one called the school and the other called game.
If certain events take place upon the console, we are to insert our keys in the appropriate locks and turn our keys.
Shotwell has a key and I have a key.
The stories were chosen by TC Boyle, whose own stories have been appearing in the New Yorkers since the early nineties.
His most recent book, the collected Stories of T.
Karagason Boyle, volume two, came out in the fall of 2013.
TC Boyle first appeared on this podcast in 2008 when he read bullet in the brain by Tobias Wolf.
Welcome back, Tom.
Oh, a pleasure to be here.
Thanks, Deborah.
Now, what made you think of reading Donald Barthelme this time around?
Well, he's one of my heroes, and he was one of the formative writers for me when I was first beginning to write in the early seventies to mid seventies.
I love his sense of humor and the oddity of the situations he comes up with.
And do you think that some of that oddity crept into your own work when you were starting out?
Oh, absolutely.
I was obsessed with Barthelme, with Robert Coover and ogunter Grass and Italo Calvino and Garcia Marquez, all of these writers who had a bizarre sense of humor and a bizarre worldview, and I share it with them.
Now, Barthelmes usually referred to as a postmodernist or an absurdist.