Karen Russell reads Carson McCullers's "The Jockey."
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 Carson McCullors from 1941 called the Jockey.
It was Sylvester who first saw the jockey.
He looked away, quickly, put down his whiskey glass, and nervously mashed the tip of his red nose with his thumb.
The jockey was chosen by Karen Russell, two of whose stories have appeared in the New Yorker.
Her book of short stories, St.
Lucie's home for girls raised by wolves, came out in 2006.
Hi, Karen.
Hi, Deborah.
So Carson McCullors is often described as a southern gothic writer.
Now, this story that you're reading is not set in the south and is not gothic at all.
Do you think that it's a fair category to put her in?
I was just talking with a friend about how we're never sure what people.
Mean exactly when they say southern gothic writer.
And just our ideas about gothic are like haunted castles, which doesn't seem to.
To conform anyway to the Kentucky Derby southern climb.
So I think when people categorize her that way, they're touching on the darkness inside her humor, and I do think that you can feel that in this.
Story, something of that sort of twisted.