2012-03-17
45 分钟Colm Toibin reads Sylvia Townsend Warner's "The Children's Grandmother," and discusses it with The New Yorker's fiction editor, Deborah Treisman. "The Children's Grandmother" was published in the November 25, 1950, issue of The New Yorker and can be found in "Winter in the Air and Other Stories." Colm Toibin's most recent collection of stories is "The Empty Family."
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 children's grandmother by Sylvia Townsend Warner.
Now, I watched her drinking glass after glass, drinking enough to put any man under the table.
The story was chosen by Colm Toybean, the author of the novel Brooklyn.
And the story collection's the Empty Family and Mothers and Sons.
Hi, Colm.
Hi, Tara.
So the New Yorker published about 150 of Sylvia Townsend Warner's stories over 40 years, from the 1930s to the seventies.
When did you first start reading her?
Can you tell us a little bit about her?
I don't really know anything about her at all.
What happened is that I know exactly where I bought the book.
It was a secondhand book in South King street in Dublin, certainly 1978 or 1979.
And it was a hardback big book called best Stories of the New Yorker.
So it was one of those old books.
And I remember the woman who owned that secondhand bookshop and I brought it home.
I think it had Elizabeth bishops in the village.
It had story by John Updike.