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 story by Franco Conner, the masculine principle,

which was published in The New Yorker in 1950.

You may be engaged to me, but you're going to marry my dad.

I'm at two words.

Replyed Jim in his stalled way.

Wait till he comes to live with us.

Said Fanny.

He's too interested in that house to be healthy.

The story was chosen by Anne N. Wright, the first fiction laureate of Ireland,

whose most recent novel The Green Road came out last year.

She's been publishing fiction in The New Yorker since 2000.

Hi Anne.

Hi, hi.

So when we talked about this, you had just finished writing an essay on May of Brennan and you were going

back and forth as to whether you wanted to read a Brennan story or a Franco Conner story.

What was it the root of that decision?

I think I chose the Franco Conner not as a writer, but as a reader.

You know, May of Brennan, there's been a great and wonderful project of reclamation where we're

looking again at her work.

...