2008-08-08
24 分钟Jeffrey Eugenides reads Harold Brodkey's short story "Spring Fugue," 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, the story is Spring Fugue.
By Harold Brodke first impulse of active love, a sloppy kiss.
While my wife is putting on her shoes, she gazes at me.
Oh, it's spring, she says.
Spring Fugue was published in the magazine in the spring of 1990.
The story was chosen today by Jeffrey Eugenides, whose novel Middlesex won the Pulitzer Prize in 2002.
Eugenides has been publishing short fiction in the New Yorker for more than ten years.
He joins me from a studio in Princeton, New Jersey.
Hi, Jeff.
Hi, Deborah.
So you recently edited an anthology of love stories called my mistress's Sparrow is dead, and I noticed that you included two Harold Brodke stories in I know, I know.
No one else got more than one, not even checker.
I'm being very good to Harold, so.
I wondered, what is it that draws you so strongly to his work?
Well, one reason I chose two of.
His stories was because the first one was written, I think, when he was in his mid twenties, and the last one was written when he was much older.
So the change in his style was remarkable to me, and I thought anyone reading the anthology would, in addition to encountering all these different stories about love, would actually see what happened to a person who loved language over an entire career.