This is the New Yorker Fiction Podcast from the New Yorker magazine.

I'm Deborah Treesman, Fiction Editor at the New Yorker.

Each month we invite a writer to juice a story from the magazine's archives to read and discuss.

This month we're going to hear Stone Mattress by Margaret Atwood,

which was published in the New Yorker in December of 2011.

At the outset, Verna had not intended to kill anyone.

What she had in mind was a vacation.

Pure and simple.

Take a breather, do some inner accounting, shed-worn skin.

The story was chosen by A.M. Holmes, who's the author of 10 Books of Fiction,

including the story collection Days of All, which comes out this month.

Hi, A.M.

Hi, Deborah.

So last time you were on the podcast, you read The Lottery by Shirley Jackson.

And one of the darkest stories of the last century.

This time you've chosen another dark story by Margaret Atwood.

Do you think that these two stories appeal to you for the same reasons?

You know, it's interesting.

I hadn't thought about it in that sense.

But I would say they appeal to a kind of darkness that often goes unspoken,

that I think is in the culture, as opposed to say in me personally.

So yeah, I think that there is that thread of trying to figure out how one illustrates

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