Yiyun Li reads John McGahern's "The Wine Breath."
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 the irish writer John McGairn.
There was nothing left but his own life.
There had been nothing but that all along.
The story is called the Wine Breath, and it appeared in the magazine in April of 1977.
It was chosen for the podcast by Yi and Lee, the author of the novel the Vagrants.
Lee has published several stories in the magazine, as well as a personal history about the chinese cultural revolution.
She grew up in Beijing, moved to the US in 1996, and currently teaches at the University of California, Davis.
She joins us from a studio in Berkeley.
John McGarren died in 2006, and during his life he was referred to as the best irish short story writer since James Joyce.
But he's still not really a household name in the US.
How did you first come across his work?
I ran into his books a couple years ago in a bookstore in London.
I'd never heard of the name, so I picked up a couple novels and really fell in love with his writing.
So you had no idea who he was, you just were attracted by the books, right?
I think that just serendipity sometimes works in life.
You know, you run into someone or a book.
When we talked about doing the podcast, we talked about a couple of other writers too, whom you were interested in reading, and they were William Trevor and B's Pritchett.