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 Sierra Leone by John McGarren,

which appeared in The New Yorker in August of 1977. The story was chosen by Anne Enright,

who's the author of three story collections and eight novels, including The Gathering,

which won the Man Booker Prize, and The Ren, the Ren. Hi, Anne. Hi, how are you, Deborah? Good, welcome. Let's start with

why you wanted to read a story by John McGarran today. Yeah, John McGarron is a great Irish writer.

And if you don't know who he is, he is the Irish writer's Irish writer. He is the one that we all

read, argue with in our heads, admire,

approach, you know, get annoyed with the whole nine yards. He, this story is from 1977,

so it's mid McGarhern.

His early and his later work was set in the Irish countryside where he found great solace

and difficulty.

But this is set in the middle.

He's just kind of working things out.

He just gets an enormous feeling of the sincerity of his intention and the way he's

working on life.

So it is, as you said, this is mid-career.

The story came out when McGarron was 42, so not early in his career, not late.

Do you see it as standing out from the later work or the earlier work being different in tone or style?

So the middle work are set between Dublin and the countryside. The early work is set in the

...