This is the New Yorker Fiction Podcast from the New Yorker magazine.

I'm Debra 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 losing game by JF Powers, which was published in the New Yorker in November of 1955.

Ah, that was it. The pastor had won again.

He was safe in his room, secure in the knowledge that his curate wouldn't knock and start the whole business all over, not for a while anyway.

Father Faber went away.

Going downstairs, he told himself that though he had lost, he had extended the pastor as never before and would get the best of him yet.

The story was chosen by Annie Prue, who is the author of four story collections and five novels, most recently, Barkskins, which was published earlier this year.

Hi, Annie.

Hi, Debra.

So JF Powers was one of the first people you considered reading for the podcast. What made him come to mind?

Well, he's a very favorite author of mine. I've loved his writing for many, many years.

I think he's worth looking at again and again and again. I think I've been reading Powers for about 30 years.

How did you come across him for the first time?

I honestly don't remember.

It was one of the short stories, but then I very quickly discovered Morduban and later was excited when Wheat that Spring of Green came out his final second novel.

So Powers has always been of great interest to me for the size and the structure of his stories and their smallness and largeness at the same time.

What is it that makes them small and large? What are the qualities?

They seem to be on the surface rather slight stories about the minor problems of priests and curates and pastors and one of the things that interested me about them, I think at first, and still does, is the

kind of an underlying paint of sin on some of these stories and of the seven deadly sins, the one that seemed to interest Powers the most is superbia pride.

So this is there. It's lurking in every single story and it's certainly lurking in this story.

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