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

I'm Debra 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 Colonel's daughter by Robert Coover,

which was published in the New Yorker in September of 2013.

The Colonel is dispassionately systematic, observant, calculating, exacting, ultimately ruthless.

The story was chosen by Harry Kunzru, who's the author of one short story collection and five novels,

including the impressionist, God's Without Men, and white tears.

Hi, Harry.

Hello.

So what's your history with Robert Coover?

Are you a lifelong reader of his?

I got to him quite young, yes.

When I was, I think, 18 or 19, I had one of these sort of formative friendships with somebody who had more sophisticated literary taste than me,

and he had a shelf for American fiction, mostly to the 60s and 70s postmodernist fiction,

and sort of fabulous fiction of things like John Bath.

And Coover's pric songs and desks was one of those books.

And I, in the way that you do at that time, I kind of took on his canon as sort of wholesale as my new canon.

And so, yeah, Bob Coover was part of that.

Yeah.

What was it that appealed to you?

Well, I think I hadn't been aware that you could have such formal fun with storytelling.

...