This is the New Yorker fiction podcast from The New Yorker magazine.

I'm Deborah Trisman, 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 Backbone by David Foster Wallace, which appeared in the New Yorker in March of 2011.

Nor was it ever established precisely why this boy had devoted himself to the goal of being able to press his lips to every square inch of his own body.

It is not clear even that he conceived of the goal as an achievement in any conventional sense.

The story was chosen by Adam Levine, who is the author of four books of fiction,

including the novel's Bubble Gum from 2020 and Mount Chicago from 2022.

Hi, Adam.

Hi, Deborah. Hi, Debra.

So tell me about you and David Foster Wallace.

Are you a long time admirer?

Yes, I would say very much.

So I decided I wanted to, you know, write seriously before I'd read him.

But I think he was one of the first two or three writers who, after I had

decided that, I really went to. It was like, I came at, I came at fiction kind of an out of order.

I wasn't an English student, really. And it was, I sort of came to him and Philip Roth at the same

time.

And, uh, interesting combination. Yeah, yeah, it was really, you know, it was like, and like when I was young, I think it's, I think the, the, the, the writers that got me interested in being a writer, I think actually David Foster Wallace, his work contains both of them in a way, which is like J.D. Salinger and Kurt Vonnegut. Like when I was a kid, that's what I fell in love with in fiction.

And, um... both of them in a way, which is like J.D. Salinger and Kurt Vonnegut. Like when I was a kid, that's what I,

what I fell in love with in fiction. And I sort of saw kind of both of those things in Wallace and

George Saunders. And George was the third one of those. So you were obviously a reader, even if you

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