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

I'm Debra 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 the night in question by Tobias Wolfe.

On the night in question, Frank said,

Mike's foreman called up and asked him to take another fellowship at the drawbridge station where he'd been working.

A Monday night it was mid-January, bitter cold.

The story was chosen by Achille Sharma, whose fiction has been appearing in the New Yorker since 1997.

His latest novel, Family Life, is coming out this month.

Hi Achille.

Hi Debra.

So the night in question was published in the magazine in 1996, which was not long before you were first published here and starting out with your own first novel.

Was that when you started reading Tobias Wolfe?

Was it a formative time in your own development as a writer?

The first time I read him was in 1992 or 1993.

And it was his memoir.

This boy's life?

Yeah, that's a wonderful memoir.

The intensity he brings to fiction though is sort of magnitude's greater.

What he does is not something that I would choose to do, because the intensity that he generates is almost painful.

I've read this story many times, and every time I wonder what parts am I going to skip?

Because it's so painful.

...