James Salter reads Reynolds Price's "His Final Mother" and discusses it with The New Yorker's fiction editor, Deborah Treisman. "His Final Mother" was published in the May 21, 1990, issue of The New Yorker and can be found in "Reynolds Price: The Collected Stories." James Salter's novels include "The Hunters" and "Light Years."
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 Reynolds Price's story, his final mother.
Like all sane children with baffling, even murderous parents, he understood that something he himself had done had brought this fate down on him.
The story was chosen by James Salter, whose novels include the Hunters, a sport, and a pastime, and light years.
Salter has also written screenplays, memoirs, and many short stories.
Hi, Jim.
Hello.
So Reynolds Price died early last year at 77.
He published this story in the New Yorker in 1990.
Did you first read it back then, when it first came out?
No, I didn't.
I'd read other things of Reynolds.
I was actually looking for a story, and I saw this one by Reynolds and read it, and I was drawn to it.
Why did you go into this thinking that he was the writer you wanted to read?
Well, I did it out of some.
Sense of loyalty, actually, having known him and the fact that he wrote numerous books, more than 20, and yet one single story in the New Yorker, and that fact appealed to me somehow.
And of course, when I read the story, I saw that it is very, very Reynolds Price.
What else would it be?