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 we're going to hear The Shaw by Cynthia Ozek.

She was sure that Stella was waiting for Meg to die so that she could put her teeth into the little thighs.

The story was chosen by Joyce Carol Oats, whose stories have been appearing in The New Yorker since 1994.

She's the author of more than 40 novels and 29 story collections.

Her latest novel Carthage came out in January.

Hi Joyce.

Hi.

So you did the podcast about five years ago and at that point you chose a story by Udora Welty called Whereas The Voice Coming From,

which was about a white southerner who kills a black civil rights leader.

This time you chose Cynthia Ozek's The Shaw, which is a Holocaust story.

And both of these stories are set, you know, very sort of iconic moments in history.

Do you think that they work in similar ways as fiction?

I think I've drawn to these both these stories because of the succignus of the structures, the power of the voices,

the headlong momentum of the language and the aesthetic qualities probably by the first thing that gripped me about them.

But as you say, each does deal with these very significant times in history and they're very painful.

Both of them are very, very painful.

Yeah.

And one of the things we talked about when you read The Udora Welty story was the sense that she and that story as the title showed in a sense been inhabited by a voice.

And Cynthia Ozek talking about this story said, I'm just going to read you a quote from her,

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