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 Donald Bartholomew story called The Indian Uprising,

which was published in the magazine in 1965.

I held Sylvia by her bear claw necklace.

Call off your braves, I said.

We have many years left to live.

The story was chosen by Chris Adrien, whose own story, The Warm Fuzzies, is part of our 20 under 40 series.

Chris Adrien is also the author of Two Novels, Gobs Grief and the Children's Hospital,

and a collection of stories titled A Better Angel.

He joins us from a studio in Provincetown, Massachusetts.

Hi, Chris.

Oh, hi, Deborah.

The Donald Bartholomew, who died in 1989, was a very playful and experimental writer,

and often his stories like this one stray into the surreal or the absurd.

Those elements sometimes appear in your work, too.

Is that what attracts you to him?

I think so, and I think I've had kind of a big crush on him,

since I first encountered him when I was a sophomore in college.

Someone happened to have left a copy of Snow White in the student lounge,

and that book was just entirely different from anything I had really ever encountered,

...