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 story by Joy Williams, Chicken Hill, which was published

in The New Yorker in September of 2015.

You go away now and when you come back in a few months say, I'll give you some jewelry.

I'll come back tomorrow.

That's so soon Ruth protested, but all right, the day after tomorrow.

The important thing is to go away now.

The story was chosen by Dana Spioda, who is the author of Four Novels.

An excerpt from her most recent novel, Innocence and Others, was published in The New Yorker

in December.

Hi, Dana.

Hi, Deborah.

So you've chosen a very recent story by Joy Williams, who's been publishing stories for

more than 30 years now.

How did you first come to her work?

I first was reading her novels.

Gordon Lish actually was the person who recommended Joy Williams worked to me.

I was working for him at a literary magazine called The Quarterly.

And I loved the novels and in fact the quick and the dead remains a huge influence on me

and my second novel really showed me how to write about political content without being

...