Hilton Als reads James McCourt's "Kaye Wayfaring in 'Avenged'"
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 James McCourt called Kay Wayfaring.
In avenged, she whispered, she grasped, she leaped, she plunged.
Again, she became an avenger.
Our reader this month is Hilton Als, a staff writer and theater critic for the New Yorker.
Hilton has been contributing to the New Yorker since 1989, and this is his second appearance on this program.
Hi, Hilton.
Hello.
So James McCourt published his first novel, Mardu Gorgeous, about a fictional opera singer in 1975.
And at that time, he was championed by a lot of other writers, including Susan Sontag and Harold Bloom.
And he followed that ten years later with the story collection Kay Wayfaring and Avenged, the title story of which we'll be hearing today.
And he's published four other books of fiction since then, including now voyagers a couple of years ago.
How did you first come across his work?
I can't remember exactly how I came across Marduk gorgeous.
I think it was handed around among a group of gay men who were opera aficionados and followers of McCourt's career in little magazines.
But they had also admired him as a film critic.
He used to write for film comment and a bunch of other magazines and work as a publicist, I think, for films.
So he was a figure around town.