Hello and welcome to Slate's Audio Book Club, our summer edition.

I'm Megan O'Rourke, and I'm here with Katie Roifie, a professor at NYU, and Troy Patterson, Slate's TV critic.

Welcome both of you.

Happy summer.

Thanks.

We are going to do something a little bit different in this edition of the

audiobook club. We are going to talk about two short stories.

John Cheever's The Swimmer and Flannery O'Connor's A Good Man is hard to find.

And the reason we're doing this is that there are two big new biographies out of each

writer. So there's Brad Gooch's biography of Flannery O'Connor. Does someone have that title?

It's just Flannery, I think. Yeah. Flannery, a life of Flannery of Connery. And then we have

Blake Bailey's Cheever, a life of John Cheever.

And we'll talk a little bit about the biographies, but really the biographies sent us back to the work, and that's what we want to talk about today.

We're going to start with John Cheever, the swimmer. So one question I just want to throw out to both of you is, you know, one thing I was struck by reading this and, though, Connor, is just, you know, the difficulty of going back to these stories that have so fully entered the kind of cultural lexicon that we feel that we're so

acquainted with already somehow. And it was really actually totally enjoyable to just reread the

story, which I have a vivid memory of, but haven't probably read in about 12 years. And so what was that

experience like for you? Did you feel you could read the story afresh, or did you come to it with all these ideas

of what it was?

I had less a vivid memory than a vague sense.

And the story is vivid enough to blow that out of my head instantly.

So I felt like I was reading it for the first time when it must be

the fourth.

...