Antonya Nelson reads Mavis Gallant's short story "When We Were Nearly Young" and discusses Gallant 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 ask a current fiction writer to choose a story from the magazine's archive to read and discuss.
This month, we'll hear Mavis Gallant's story.
When we were nearly young, we stood.
In endless queues together in banks, avoiding the bank where Carlos worked because we were afraid of giggling and embarrassing him.
We shelled peanuts and gossiped and held hands in the blank, amiable waiting state that had become the essence of life.
When we were nearly young was first published in the magazine in 1960.
It was chosen from our archive by Antonia Nelson, who has been publishing short stories in the New Yorker since the early nineties.
Nelson is the author of three novels and five short story collections, including her latest entitled some Fun.
She joins me now from the studios of KmUW in Wichita, Kansas.
Hi, Tony.
Hi, Deborah.
Mavis Galant started publishing fiction in the early 1950s, and she was a fixture in the New Yorker for decades.
When did you first start reading her work?
I must have read some of her work without paying attention to the name because the New Yorker was always around our house, and that's the case with many of the New Yorker writers.
I recognize the work when I come back to it without having attached it to a particular person at the time.
So, you know, in the seventies is my guess.
And it was recently, maybe three or four years ago, I re investigated her, and I don't actually remember why.
Maybe it was the publication of the Michael and Dace Paris stories, his compilation of her stories, that made me want to read all of her work.