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, the story is Spring Fugue by Harold Broadke.

First impulse of active love.

A sloppy kiss while my wife is putting on her shoes.

She gazes at me, oh, it's spring, she says.

Spring Fugue was published in the magazine in the spring of 1990.

The story was chosen today by Jeffrey Eugenides,

whose novel Middlesex won the Pulitzer Prize in 2002.

Eugenides has been publishing short fiction in The New Yorker for more than 10 years.

He joins me from the studio in Princeton, New Jersey.

Hi, Jeff.

Hi, Debra.

So you recently edited an anthology of love stories called My Mr. Sid Sparrow is Dead.

And I noticed that you included two Harold Broadke stories.

I know, I know.

No one else got more than one, not even checking.

I'm being very good to Harold.

So I wondered what is it that draws you so strongly to his work?

Well, one reason I chose two of his stories was because the first one was written,

I think, when he was in his mid-twenties.

...