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 a dayday by Mavis Goulant,

which was published in the New Yorker in January of 1987.

At that moment, dayday did an unprecedented and courageous thing.

He picked up the platter of melon, crawling with wasps,

and took it outside as far as the foot of the tree,

and came back to applause, at least his sister clap,

and young Madame Chivalier crochet cried,

bravo, bravo, dayday smile, but then he was always smiling.

The story was chosen by Ann Bede, who's the author of more than 20 books of fiction,

including the story collection, The Accomplished Guest, and The Novel,

a wonderful stroke of luck, which was published earlier this year.

Hi Ann.

Hi Deborah.

So you mentioned to me that you read this story for the first time last summer.

How did you come across it then?

I'm a visiting writer at the University of Virginia this fall,

and I have to give two public talks, and I was pulling books off of my shelf,

just looking for different examples of some things that I wanted to mention in those talks,

and I pulled down the best American short stories of the 80s, which was edited by Shannon Ravinole,

...