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 Donald Barthelme story called the Indian Uprising, which was published in the magazine in 1965.
I held Sylvia by her bear claw necklace.
Call off your braves, I said.
We have many years left to live.
The story was chosen by Chris Adrian, whose own story, the warm Fuzzies, is part of our 20 under 40 series.
Chris Adrian is also the author of two novels, Gob's Grief and the Children's Hospital, and a collection of stories titled a Better angel.
He joins us from a studio in Provincetown, Massachusetts.
Hi, Chris.
Hi, Deborah.
Donald Barthelme, who died in 1989, was a very playful and experimental writer.
And often his stories, like this one, stray into the surreal or the absurd.
Those elements sometimes appear in your work, too.
Is that what attracts you to him?
I think so, and I think I've had kind of a big crush on him since I first encountered him when I was a sophomore in college, someone happened to have left a copy of Snow White in the student lounge, and that book was just entirely different from anything I had really ever encountered, aside from the regular old high school curriculum stuff, Hawthorne, Melville.
Aside from them, I mostly read science fiction and fantasy books, which has its own sort of adventurous spirit.
But Barthelme was radically different.
And I think if someone hadn't left their copy of Snow White in that funny little room, that I would have ended up being a different kind of writer.