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

I'm Deborah Treesman, Fiction Editor at the New Yorker.

Every month we ask a writer to choose a story from the magazine's archives to read and discuss.

Today we'll hear a story by William Trevor from 1993 called A Day.

It was in France in the hotel St. George during their September holiday seven years ago

that Mrs. Lethwess found out about her husband's other woman.

A day was chosen from the New Yorker archives by Jompa Lahiri,

whose short stories have been appearing in the magazine since 1998.

She won the Pulitzer Prize in 2000 for her first book, A Collection of Stories Entitled Interpreter of

Malities. Her third book, On A Customed Earth, is coming out in the spring.

Welcome to the program, Jompa.

Thank you. The New Yorker has been publishing William Trevor since the late 70s. Did you first

read him in the magazine? I didn't. A friend recommended him, and this was right around the time

that I was trying to write fiction or just sort of getting my bearings.

It's been you were in college? This was no. I was probably mid-20s around then, and so I got the

big orange collected stories, but I was also receiving the New Yorker, and I remember this story

from the magazine. I remember how deeply sad and I was, and it really stayed with me that

the imagery and but also more generally, the the discomfort I felt when I read the story that

for this woman. The story is about a day in the life of a woman, a wife, a housewife

watching television, of dealing with her housekeeper, preparing dinner for her husband,

while at the same time many other things are going on for her emotionally.

Is there anything else about the story that you think we should know before we hear it?

...