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 Shakespeare's Memory by Jorge Luis Borges.

I would possess Shakespeare and possess him as no one had ever possessed anyone before.

The story was chosen by Hishan Matar, whose first novel in the country of men,

was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2006.

His latest novel, Anatomy of a Disappearance, was published in 2011.

Hi, Hishan.

Hello, Deborah.

So have you been a lifelong reader of Borges? Has he been an influence on your own work?

I've certainly read him for a long time.

It's very difficult for me to say he's been an influence.

I don't think he has, but he's been an influence on my thinking about literature.

Because I think he has such a complex and intricate and agile intellect.

But actually, I think he has a very simple, simple and the clear sense, temperament.

So he does this wonderful thing that I think has got to be one of the things that literature is about.

It's a kind of thinking he thinks through these stories.

And he doesn't think, you know, in the sort of, you know, it's not an argument or hypothesis,

but he thinks in that playful way, that way that he doesn't really know.

You don't get the sense that he's figured it out and he wants to tell you,

but he's exploring what this means and the possibilities of it.

...