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 Dream of Men by Mary Gateskill,

which was published in the New Yorker in November of 1998.

She put her foot up on the table and drank her coffee out of a striped mug, the size of a little bowl.

She had to be at her job at the medical clinic in half an hour.

She wasn't late, but still her body was racing inside.

The story was chosen by Ben Marcus, who's the author of two novels and two story collections,

most recently leaving the sea, which was shortlisted for the Franco Conner International Short Story Award.

Hi, Ben.

Hi, Debra.

So how did you first start reading Mary Gateskill?

I probably read her stories in college, bad behavior.

She really seemed to come out of nowhere.

It was transgressive fiction, but not in the way maybe I was accustomed to with a lot of formal pyrotechnics.

It felt really emotionally transgressive, sad, disturbing, strange, very believable.

I like the discomfort of the stories, but then they could suddenly veer into beauty.

She seems to have a lot of registers. It's hard to pin her down.

What else would you have been reading at the time? I mean, anything in that?

Probably a whole lot of Donald Bartholomey.

So it was very different.

...