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 recent story, Axis, by Alice Monroe, which was published in January.
At first, he had made quite an effort to be quiet, not because he believed in any danger, but just because he meant to go easy, be very gentle with her.
The story was chosen by Lauren Groszen, whose first story in the magazine came out in this year's summer fiction issue.
Groff is the author of the story collection Delicate Edible Birds and the novels the Monsters of Templeton and Arcadia, which is due out next year.
She joins us from wuft in Gainesville, Florida.
Hi, Lauren.
Hi, Deborah.
So I see that you listed Alice Monroe somewhere as your favorite author.
What is it about her, and how did you first start reading her stories?
She's definitely my favorite living author.
I think probably George Eliot's my favorite overall author.
But I love Alice Monroe because she changed my mind about fiction.
I had been writing seriously for a number of years and thought that the people who were very experimental, the breakers of the form, were the ones that I wanted to emulate.
I didn't scorn, but I didn't love the realists.
You know, I didn't love Alice Monroe as much as I should have.
And then one day I read a story from her collection, hate ship friendship courtship, love ship marriage, which is called family furnishings.
And it was just one of those stories where I looked up and the whole world had changed after I finished it.