Jennifer Egan Reads Margaret Atwood

The New Yorker: Fiction

WNYC Studios and The New Yorker

Yorker, Wnyc, Literature, Books, New, Fiction, Arts

4.6 • 3.6K Ratings

🗓️ 1 January 2025

⏱️ 70 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Jennifer Egan joins Deborah Treisman to read and discuss “Kat,” by Margaret Atwood, which was published in The New Yorker in 1990. Egan’s books of fiction include “The Keep,” “A Visit from the Goon Squad,” “Manhattan Beach,” and “The Candy House.” She is a winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Pulitzer Prize, and the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, among other honors. She has been publishing fiction and nonfiction in The New Yorker since 1989.

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Transcript

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0:37.4	This is the New Yorker Fiction Podcast from The New Yorker magazine.
0:41.2	I'm Deborah Treesman, fiction editor at The New Yorker.
0:44.3	Each month, we invite a writer to choose a story from the magazine's archives to read and discuss.
0:49.3	This month, we're going to hear Cat by Margaret Atwood, which appeared in the New Yorker in March of 1990.
0:55.4	The story was chosen by Jennifer Egan, who's published seven books of fiction, including
0:59.6	the Pulitzer Prize winning a visit from the Goon Squad, and most recently The Candy House.
1:05.1	Hi, Jenny. Hi, Deborah. So on past episodes of the fiction podcast, you read stories by Lori Siegel and Mary Gateskill.
1:14.6	And today you chose Margaret Atwood. Why was that? Well, I like picking stories that I actually
1:21.7	haven't looked at in a really long time, but have stayed with me in some way. And I actually
1:26.1	hadn't read Cat since the 90s. So I think part of it was just a wish to revisit it. And then once I did, in some ways, it's really a story about a changing era. And yet its own era now feels way in the distance for all kinds of reasons. So as a cultural and personal artifact,
1:46.7	it felt really fascinating to me. Yeah, so it came out in 1990, and I think you had published
1:52.9	your first story in the magazine the year before that. So you were aware of the New Yorker.
1:58.7	Oh, yes. Did you read it first in the magazine? I read it in the
2:03.1	magazine, and it felt really important somehow. I think part of it was my age. You know, I was
2:08.6	27 when it came out. I'm now 62. And at the time, it felt like a reflection on a certain
	...

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