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 the other place by Mary Gatesville.

I didn't really plan to do it, I just wanted to feel the gun in my pocket and look at the woman

and know that I could do it.

The story was chosen by Jennifer Egan, whose own stories have been appearing in the magazine since 1989.

Her novel, A Visit from the Goon Squad, won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction

and the National Book Critics Circle Award.

This is Jennifer Egan's second appearance on the New Yorker Fiction Podcast.

So welcome back, Jenny.

Thank you.

The story that you chose, the other place, came out in the magazine quite recently in February of 2011.

Did you first read it then?

Yes, I just read it when the New Yorker arrived and I was really struck by it.

I was frightened as I read and very excited when it finished,

so that even though I didn't remember the particulars that well, I was eager to revisit it.

What was it that stayed with you?

I think the feeling of intense menace, but mixed with a lot of other complicated humanity,

specifically parenthood, and I think to the feeling of redemption that somehow Mary Gatesville

managed to rest from this very dark and threatening situation and point of view.

Had you been reading Mary Gatesville's work at that point?

...