Marisa Silver reads Peter Taylor's "Porte-Cochere" and discusses it with The New Yorker's fiction editor, Deborah Treisman.
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 from 1949 by Peter Taylor called Porte Cochere.
Never once in his life had he punished or restrained them in any way.
He had given them a freedom unknown to children in the land of his childhood.
Porte Cochere was chosen by Marissa Silver, the author of three books of fiction, including the novel the God of War.
Five of her own stories have been published in the New Yorker.
She joins me from a studio in Los Angeles.
Hi, Marissa.
Hi, Debra.
So Peter Taylor was one of the first writers who came into your mind when we started talking about this podcast.
Why was that?
Well, I'm a huge Peter Taylor fan.
His novel A Summons to Memphis is.
One of my all time favorite books.
And I think he came into mind because something that I adore about his work is that he takes the smallest, most minute moment and explodes it into an entire world of feeling and an entire understanding of a social class and a piece of history.
And this story really typifies that for me.
Taylor died in 1994 when he was 77.
Hes a writer who was very popular at a certain time.