Robert Coover reads "The Daughters of the Moon," by Italo Calvino.
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 the daughters of the moon by Italo Calvino.
And her body was not the only one glowing before my eyes.
Now I saw girls everywhere, stretched out in the strangest poses, clinging to the radiators, doors, and fenders of the speeding cars.
The story was chosen by Robert Coover, whose last novel, noir, came out in 2010.
A new novel, the Brunus Day of wrath, will be published in September.
Robert Cougier joins us from Providence, Rhode island.
Hi, Bob.
Hi.
So my first question for you is, what made Calvino an obvious choice for you here?
When we talked about this, you mentioned this triumvirate of Calvino and Borges in Barthelme, and I just wondered, are those the writers you turn to most often?
Well, they're the New Yorker writers I turn to most often.
There are other authors, some who predate the New Yorker by several centuries that I also turn to.
But Calvino especially, I think in that list, he was the writer who most nearly approximated the type of writing or thinking about writing that characterized my work and the work of a lot of writers of my generation.
So I was pleased to see that there was something that you had published that had not been read and that I could choose it.
Perhaps not his most typical sort of story.
It's got a little bit more of a message than a lot of Calvino's work, but it does contain those tremendous imaginative gifts that he had and his love of sort of traditional forms of folktale, of fairytale type of thinking that informs a very contemporary tale.
You mentioned that you assigned this story in your exemplary ancient fictions class.