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 story Clara by Roberta Bologna.

She once told me that there were three cladas in her soul,

a little girl, an old crow and enslaved by her family,

and a young woman, the real cladda,

who wanted to get out of that city forever.

The story was chosen by Francisco Goldman, whose novel, say her name,

was excerpted in the New Yorker in 2011.

Hi, Frank.

Hi, Deborah.

When we first talked about doing a podcast,

the first two writers who came to your mind were Bologna and Borges.

Why those two in particular, is there a connection between them for you?

There's a huge connection between them.

Bologna Worship Borges, he has a wonderful line when there's interviews,

or he says, I could live under a table reading Borges.

A famous Spanish critic said of Savage Detectives,

that this was the kind of novel Borges would have written if Borges wrote novels.

And people were so puzzled by that at first,

because Savage Detectives, this sprawling, multi-voiced, sex-obsessed,

...