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

I'm Deborah Triesman, 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 one minus one by Column Tobine,

which was published in The New Yorker in May of 2007.

I know now, as I walked toward the house I have rented here,

that if I called and told you that the bitter past has come back to me tonight and these alien

streets with a force that feels like violence, you would say that you are not surprised.

You would wonder only why it has taken six years.

The story was chosen by Hisham Matar, whose most recent book, A month in Sienna, was published last year.

Hello, Deborah. We're doing this together. We talked about Shakespeare's memory by Borges.

One minus one is a very different story, a very different kind of story. What draws you to it?

Well, it's a story I love, but also I wanted to choose a story that I had read in the magazine

and remember vividly the encounter with it. It just affected me very, very deeply.

And for how simple it is, it is in very subtle ways. It's about such complex things.

And I think for that reason, over the years since I first read it, I've occasionally thought

back on it and found more and more layers than it. Well, the story is about a man from Ireland

living in the US who returns home as his mother is dying. And you've also written in fiction

and in nonfiction about exile, about the loss of a parent, about a strangement.

Was there something in the subject matter that speaks to you or is it more in the writing?

I mean, Kong Toibian does that very well in his work. It's something that he manages to

open up that space of rootlessness that has touched me very much. So I'm sure there's a connection.

...