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

I'm Deborah Treesman, Fiction Editor at the New Yorker.

Every month we ask a writer to choose a story from the magazine's archives to read and discuss.

Today we'll hear a story by Jean Stafford, called Children or Board on Sunday,

which was published in the magazine in 1948.

She wanted them to go together to some hopelessly disreputable bar

and to console one another in the most modeling fashion.

Over a lengthy succession of powerful drinks of whiskey to compare their illnesses,

to marry their invalid souls for these few hours of painful communion.

Children or Board on Sunday was chosen from the archives by Hilton Owls,

a staff writer and theater critic for the New Yorker.

I, Hilton.

Hi.

Hilton.

Jean Stafford was a novelist and short story writer who published quite a few pieces in the New Yorker, mostly in the 1950s.

Children or Board on Sunday was her first story that the magazine published.

What made you choose this one?

I'm always fascinated by how she handles the incredibly hard balance between the internal and external worlds.

Often in the lives of women, we get one or the other, we don't get a sort of admixture.

And what I liked so much about her work always was that the external world always sort of provides a trigger

for an emotional, intellectually pretty arduous journey that the character goes on.

And the story is about a woman going to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

...