2009-06-02
26 分钟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 actually going to hear two stories, one by Veronica Gang, called Love.
Trouble is my business.
She chuckled insanely, like Mister Reagan looped on something you wouldn't want to drink.
While you read Proust, and the second by Ian Frazier, called Coyote v Acme.
Mister Coyote states that on occasions too numerous to list in this document, he has suffered mishaps with explosives purchased of defendant.
The stories were chosen by Jonathan Franzen, a frequent contributor to the magazine and the author of the novel the corrections.
His latest book is a memoir called the Discomfort Zone, which is out in paperback from Picador.
Hi, Jonathan.
Hi, Deborah.
So you chose to read two pieces for this podcast, both of which were published in the magazine not officially as fiction, but more under the rubric that we used to call casuals and now call shouts and murmurs, which is to say things that are still fictional but considered to be a little lighter, and they're more humorous and not necessarily aspiring to be great literature.
What was it that made you choose these pieces?
I would go back to the early eighties, when I was becoming a New Yorker reader, and there were no, I don't know what they're called.
The little department titles.
The rubrics?
Yeah, the little rubrics.
You didn't have those back then.
In fact, you didn't have bylines.