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 the Children's Grandmother by Sylvia Townsend Warner.

Now I watched her drinking glass after glass, drinking enough to put any man under the table.

The story was chosen by Column Toibin, the author of the novel Brooklyn,

and the story collections, the empty family and mothers and sons.

Hi, Column.

Hi, Tara.

So the New Yorker published about 150 of Sylvia Townsend Warner's stories over 40 years from the 1930s to

the 70s. When did you first start reading her? Can you tell us a little bit about her?

I don't really know anything about her at all.

What happened is that I know exactly where I bought the book. It was a second-hand book in South

King Street in Dublin, certainly in 1978 or 1979, and it was a hard-backed big book called

Best Stories of the New Yorker. So it was old books, and I remember the woman who owned that

second-hand bookshelf, and I brought it home. I think it had a little bit of bishops in the village,

it had, sorry, by John Updike, and I think towards the end, it had this story that I didn't think

you could write. In other words, it really jumped at me, the fact that you could have this completely

gothic story, the story that was so almost strange, so strange that you think, well, it's not part

of any universal experience, it's not part of any common experience, and yet every detail,

every tone in it seemed to me fresh and new and incredibly interesting. I never forgot it.

I would always tell people about it, and I know that my friend Carmen Calil who published

...