Tobias Wolff reads Stephanie Vaughn's short story "Dog Heaven," 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 Stephanie Vaughn's story dog heaven.
I came to on the grass with the dog barking.
Wake up.
He seemed to say, do you know your name?
My name is Duke.
My name is Duke.
Dog Heaven was published in the New Yorker in 1989.
In 1994, it was included in the vintage Book of contemporary American Short Stories, which was edited by Tobias Wolf, who chose the story for this month's podcast.
Tobias Wolf is the author of two memoirs, this Boy's Life and in Pharaoh's army, the novel Old School and many short stories, ten of which have appeared in the New Yorker.
His most recent book, our Story begins New and Selected Stories, was published earlier this year.
Hi, Toby.
Hi, Deborah.
So Stephanie Vaughan published four stories in the New Yorker in the late seventies and eighties.
They were collected 18 years ago in her book Sweet Talk, and as far as I know, she hasn't published anything since then.
I saw that she was a Jones lecturer at Stanford when she was working on some of the stories.
Did you know her back then?
I met her.