2024-11-02
1 小时 17 分钟Aleksandar Hemon joins Deborah Treisman to read and discuss “Drinking Coffee Elsewhere,” by ZZ Packer, which was published in The New Yorker in 2000. Hemon, a winner of a MacArthur Fellowship and a PEN/W. G. Sebald Award, among others, is the author of eight books, including the novels “The Lazarus Project” and “The World and All It Holds,” the story collection “Love and Obstacles,” and two nonfiction works, “The Book of My Lives” and “My Parents: an Introduction.” Share your thoughts on The New Yorker’s Fiction Podcast. As a token of our appreciation, you will be eligible to enter a prize drawing up to $1,000 after you complete the survey. https://selfserve.decipherinc.com/survey/selfserve/222b/76152?pin=1&uBRANDLINK=4&uCHANNELLINK=2
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Try it@progressive.com Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates Price and coverage match limited by state law not available in all states this is the New Yorker Fiction Podcast from the New Yorker Magazine.
I'm Debra 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 Drinking Coffee Elsewhere by ZZ Packer, which appeared in the New Yorker in June of 2000.
When it was my turn, I said, my name is Dina, and if I had to be any object, I guess I'd be a revolver.
The sunlight dulled as if on cue.
The story was chosen by Alexander Hemmon, who who is the author of six books of fiction, including the story collection Love and Obstacles and the novels the Lazarus Project, a finalist for the National Book Award, and the World and All It Holds, which came out last year.
Hi Sasha.
Hello.
So what made you choose Drinking Coffee Elsewhere to read and talk about today?
Well, I love the story, as I love the book and I often teach it to my students, particularly for the past few years I've been teaching mainly undergrads at Princeton, and the way they respond to it and the way they understand the university politics or the university dorm politics and such things, it's always refreshing and so bringing it back to them brings up new things in the story every time.
Yeah, you know, it was written 24 years ago, but I'm not sure if we know exactly when it set, but probably a few years before that.
Does everything that happens in this story feel relevant for your students now?
I mean, I remember when the story was published, and I remember it was published in the early 2000s, but when I was looking at the manuscript now, I kind of forgot that it's 25 years old.
That is, most of the students who I made read the story had not been born when it was published, and yet it pertains in ways that I don't have an experience of starting school at an American college.
So I learned a lot from ZZ Packer about that, particularly a person of color and the way they enter this verified Ivy League context.
But the students understand things, often that are not so much invisible to me, but not personal to me, and that revives it in ways that are glorious.