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, due to the coronavirus lockdown, we weren't able to proceed with our planned

guest, so we're changing the format a little.

I've chosen a story to read and I asked listeners to submit questions for me to discuss through

our Twitter and Facebook pages.

The story I've chosen is Good People by David Foster Wallace, which was published in the

New Yorker in January of 2007.

All the different angles and ways they had come at the decision together did not ever include

it, the word.

For had he once said it, a vow that he did love her, loved cherry-fisher, then it all would

have been transformed.

It would not be a different stance or angle, but a difference in the very thing they were

praying and deciding on together.

I chose this story in part because it was the last piece that I worked on with David Foster

Wallace before his death in 2008, and because our correspondence about the story stayed very

vividly in my memory and came to mind when he died.

The story was eventually part of the Pale King, David Foster Wallace's posthumous novel,

which was published in 2011.

At the time that he sent it to me in December of 2006, though, I'm not sure that he knew

...