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 Bravado by William Trevor, which was published in the New Yorker in January of 2007.

The first time she'd been in the star, the first time she'd seen Manning no more than a face in the crowd,

she had admired him. He noticed her interest, he told her afterward.

He said she was his kind, and she didn't hesitate when he asked her to go out with him.

The story was chosen by Elizabeth Stroud, whose most recent book, All of Again,

an Oprah's Book Club pick was published in 2019.

Hi, Liz.

Hi, Deborah, how are you?

Good. Thank you for doing this in pandemic times.

That's my pleasure. It really is.

So what made you want to talk about a story by William Trevor today?

Has he been important to you as a writer or a reader?

Both. I think William Trevor is just such a wonderful writer, and I discovered him years and years ago through the New Yorker.

I might add, and I have always loved his work.

There's a gentleness to it, there's a subtlety to it.

He's sort of inimitable in my estimation.

He's got his own thing going on, which is just really, really lovely for me.

In a sense, he's a bit of a regionalist. His stories are not all, but mostly said in Ireland.

There's some in England.

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