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 toughest Indian in the world by Sherman Alexi,

which was published in The New Yorker in June of 1999.

We all know that nostalgia is dangerous, but I remember those days with a clear conscience.

We live in different days now, and there aren't as many Indian hitchhikers as there used to be.

The story was chosen by David Means, who's published four story collections.

His first novel, Histopia, was published earlier this year.

Hi, David.

Hey, Deborah.

So last time you were on the podcast, you read a story by Raymond Carver.

What made you pick Sherman Alexi this time?

I'm not sure. I think it was, I felt for some reason I suddenly felt that Sherman Alexi was

being neglected a little bit. I think he's a writer who

goes way beyond the category of an eight of American writer and is simply just a great

storyteller and story writer. And I felt this story had some complexity that was

that lent itself to discussion, I think, at some level.

But did you read it when it first came out?

I think I read it in book form years ago, and occasionally I've

brought it in front of my class to teach. So I've looked at it over the years again and again.

Yeah. Yeah. What does it like to teach it?

...