Chang-Rae Lee reads Don DeLillo's "Baader-Meinhof."
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 Bader Meinhof by Don DeLillo.
She was looking at Ulrika now, head and upper body, her neck rope scorched, although she didn't know for certain what kind of implement had been used in the hanging.
The story was chosen by Chang Rui Lee, who has written both fiction and nonfiction for the magazine.
He is the author of four novels, the most recent of which, the Surrendered, was published in March by Riverhead.
He joins us from a studio in Princeton where he teaches.
Hi, Cheng Rae.
Hi, Debra.
So when we first talked about doing the podcast, you were quite certain that you wanted to read something of DeLillo's.
Has his work always been important to you?
It has, really, from the time I began writing in earnest, which was probably a little after college.
I'd read white noise in college and was entranced and delighted.
But after college, I dove into, really, all the novels that had been published up to that time, and I found myself completely, completely overtaken by him.
I thought he was an incredible writer.
You know, there seems as though there's been a sort of gradual progression in his work from this sort of busy, zany quality of end zone or white noise to more sort of stately reflectiveness of some of the recent novels, like Falling man or his new one, Point Omega.
Where do you think this story, Bader Meinhof fits into that?
It's funny because it's a story that really reminds me a lot of the.
Body artist just a few novels ago.