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 choose a story from the magazine's archives to read and discuss.

This month we're going to hear Baster by Jeffrey Eugenides,

which was published in the New Yorker in June of 1996.

Plan B was more devious and inspired, less romantic, more solitary, sadder, but braver too.

The story was chosen by Achille Starma, who is the author of Two Novels,

and the story collection, A Life of Adventure and a Light, which was published last month.

Hi, Achille.

Hi, Deborah.

And the last time that you were on the podcast, you chose a story by Tobias Wolfe.

This time you've chosen Jeffrey Eugenides.

Do you think that there's any consistency in your choices?

Are you choosing for different reasons?

The writing is enormously energetic in both of them.

The way that the type of energy is different, but the intensity level is enormously high.

And is that what most draws you into a short story?

It is not what most draws me in, but it is something that can catch me and capture me.

Once you read sentences like the ones in this story or in Tobias Wolfe,

it's hard to get out of them.

The story came out in 1996.

Did you read it back then?

...