This is The New Yorker Out Loud from The New Yorker Magazine.

I'm Debra Treesman, fiction editor at The New Yorker.

Each month we ask a New Yorker fiction writer to select a story from our archives to read and discuss.

For this month's podcast, George Saunders chose You Must Know Everything by Isaac Bobble.

Study! She suddenly is set with great vehemence.

Study! And you will have everything, wealth and fame. You must know everything!

The whole world will vomit your feet and grovel before you.

You must know everything as an early story. Written in 1915 when Isaac Bobble was only 21.

The story, translated from The Russian by Max Hayward, was published in The New Yorker in 1966.

George Saunders is the author of Three Short Story Collections.

The most recent, titled In Persuasion Nation, was published by Riverhead last year.

A new collection of nonfiction, The Brain Dead Megaphone, will come out in September.

He has been contributing fiction to The New Yorker since 1992.

George Saunders joins me from the studios of WAER in Syracuse, New York.

Hi, George.

Hi, Debra.

So, the main question is, why did you choose this particular story?

Well, you know, I love everything Isaac Bobble wrote.

And when I found out that he was only 21 when he wrote this, I was really intrigued.

And especially to find out that everything he later perfects is here.

You know, it's all present in kind of this crude form.

Once you referred to Bobble as a combination of your two favorite writers, Hemingway and Karaweck.

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