This is the New Yorker Fiction Podcast from the New Yorker magazine.

I'm Deputy Treaseman 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 Fjord of Killery by Kevin Barry,

which was published in the New Yorker in February of 2010.

It was by now a hysterical downpour with great sheets of water streaming down from Wulria

and the harbor roared in the fattening light.

Visibility was reduced to 14 feet.

This all signaled that the west of Ireland holiday season had begun.

The story was chosen by Douglas Stewart,

whose first novel, Shagi Bain, won Booker Prize in 2020.

Hi, Douglas.

Hi, Deborah. How are you?

I'm all right. Welcome.

When we talked about doing this,

you had originally been inclined to choose a Scottish story

to read on the podcast, but in the end you've settled on an Irish one.

Do you think the two traditions are interlocked?

They certainly have a very close relationship,

but even in reading the Kevin Barry story,

I realized how much of their pronunciation and the expressions weren't familiar to my ear.

And so, although they're close, they are quite different.

...