I'm Deborah Treesman, fiction editor at The New Yorker, and this is a podcast bonus for The New Yorker Radio Hour.

Last week, Andrew Sean Greer's novel, Les, won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction.

Less is a biting comic account of a middle-aged, mid-level novelist named Arthur

Les, who travels around the world to prize ceremonies and literary events in an attempt to

outrun his own heartbreak. In June of 2017, we published an excerpt from Les in The New Yorker.

Here's Andrew Sean Greer, reading from that piece.

Our novelist is going to Turin for a prize ceremony, although he is not really going for a prize ceremony. He is escaping a wedding, that of young Freddie to someone named Tom.

He stared at the invitation when it came in the mail, every word embossed so that even the blind could enjoy this humiliation, and in his panic state grasped at other invitations he'd received, conferences, symposia, temporary professorships in far-flung locales like Mexico, Germany, Japan.

Les dug them up and hastily agreed to all of them, so that he could write with satisfaction on the

RSVP card, Dear Freddy and Tom, my apologies, but I will be out of the country. As it turns out,

Les has merely traded one in dignity for a series of new ones in Mexico, Germany, Japan, but first,

this one, in Italy, where he is nominated for a prize no one believes he will win.

Not his agent who urged him to stay home and start a new book,

not his sister who said that this was no way for a man his age to behave,

and certainly not less himself.

In the days leading up to the ceremony, there will be interviews, something called a confrontation

with high school students and many luncheons and dinners.

He looks forward to escaping from his hotel into the streets of Turin, the secret heart of a city he's always long to visit.

Contained deep within the printed schedule was the information

that he is a finalist for a lesser prize. The greater prize has already been awarded to the

famous British author Foster's Lancet. He wonders if the poor man is actually coming. Because of

the fearless house of jet lag, he asked to arrive a day before these events were to start,

...