One of my most fortunate recent discoveries is the New Yorker Fiction Podcast. Every month a writer chooses a story from the New Yorker archives, reads it aloud, and then discusses it briefly with the magazine's fiction editor. Coming across these stories is like stumbling upon a treasure chest. Just a few titles that I've been introduced to and fell in love with: "Reunion," by John Cheever, read by Richard Ford; "“How to Date a Brown Girl (Black Girl, White Girl, or Halfie),” by Junot Diaz, read by Diaz and selected by Edwidge Danticat; “The Gospel According to Mark,” by Jorge Luis Borges, read by Paul Theroux; "A Day," by William Trevor, read by Jhumpha Lahiri; “Bullet in the Brain,” by Tobias Wolff, read by T.C. Boyle; "The Wood Duck," by James Thurber, read by Jonathan Lethem; "Dance in America," by Lorrie Moore, read by Louise Erdrich; and "Last Night," by James Salter, read by Thomas McGuane.
(Yes--that's a long list, but what can I say?)
Anyway, just the other day I listened to another fabulous story, one of my favorites so far, "Dog Heaven," by Stephanie Vaughn, read by Tobias Wolff. But just as much as I enjoyed the story, so too did I love the post-reading discussion between Wolff and Deborah Treisman. I found myself stopping the podcast and going to back to replay Wolff's lovely description of fiction--and what he finds so appealing about Vaughn's story:
“In fact, we’re always living next door to worlds that we don’t suspect and the best fiction suddenly illuminates that thing that’s been beside us all along and makes us see it for the first time and makes us enter another world.”
That's great stuff, right?
1 comment:
I love that quote! Thank you for sharing this--I may have to look up that podcast for myself.
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