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 No Place For You My Love by Udora Welty,

which was published in the New Yorker in September of 1952.

The heat faced them. It was ahead.

They could see it waving at them, shaking in the air above the white of the road.

Always at a certain distance ahead.

Shimmering finally is a cloth with running edges of green and gold, fire and azure.

It's never anything like this in Syracuse, he said.

Or in Toledo, either.

It's your flight to dry lips.

The story was chosen by Allegra Goodman, whose books include the family Markowitz and the chalk artist.

Hi, Allegra.

Hi.

So you have chosen a story by Udora Welty.

What has her work meant to you?

I started reading her when I was just a kid.

In fact, my dad used to read aloud to our family and he read some of her funnier stories,

like why I live at the PO and pet your fine fan and some of her comic stuff.

And we would all sit around and laugh.

And I just fell in love with her.

...