2008-07-10
27 分钟Aleksandar Hemon discusses Bernard Malamud's short story "A Summer's Reading" with The New Yorker's fiction editor, Deborah Treisman.
This is the 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's story by Bernard Malamud was first published in 1956.
It's called a Summer's reading.
What are you reading?
George hesitated, then said, I got a list of books in the library once and now I'm going to read them this summer.
He felt strange and a little unhappy saying this, but he wanted Mister Catanzara to respect him.
A summers reading was chosen from the archives by Alexander Heman.
Heman was born in Bosnia, which was then part of Yugoslavia, in 1964, and moved to Chicago in 1992.
He started writing in English a few years later and published his first story in the New Yorker in 1999.
His latest novel, the Lazarus Project, came out in May.
He joins me from WBEZ in Chicago.
Hi, Sasha.
Hello, Sasha.
In the fifties, sixties and seventies, Malamud was almost as well known in this country as Saul Bellow and Philip Roth, the two other american jewish writers whom he was often grouped with.
Since he died in 1986, his degree of fame has gone down a little while roths and bellows have risen.
Did you, did you discover Malamud when you were a teenager in Sarajevo?
Did you read him after you moved here?
How did he come into your life?