Jonathan Safran Foer reads Amos Oz's "The King of Norway," which first appeared in The New Yorker in 2011.
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 Amos Oz called the King of Norway.
One evening, as he regaled her with an affecting description of the starvation in Somalia, compassion for him so overwhelmed her that she suddenly took his hand and held it to her breast.
Zvi trembled and pulled it back quickly with a gesture that was almost violent.
The story was chosen by Jonathan Safran Foer, whose fiction has been appearing in the magazine since 2001.
His novels include extremely loud and incredibly close, and everything is illuminated.
He joins me from a studio in Brooklyn.
Hi, Jonathan.
Hello.
I know youve spent some time in Israel in the last few years.
Have you ever met Amma Sazhe?
I have met him.
In fact, he was a teacher of.
Mine when I was at Princeton.
He was visiting for a semester, and I took a class on contemporary.
No, no, it was actually the history of hebrew literature at the time.
My parents told me, oh, you know.
Amasas is going to be appearing in this bookstore in Washington, DC.