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 a story from 1956, The Man of the World, by Franco Conner.

This is probably our path.

He whispered, we better not speak anymore, in case they might hear us.

I nodded, wishing I had never come.

The Man of the World was chosen by Julian Barnes, whose stories appear frequently in The New Yorker.

His latest book, A Meditation on Death, called Nothing to be Frightened of, is out in paperback from vintage.

He joins us from a studio in London. Hi, Julian.

Hi.

I know you recently edited the Every Man's Library collection, The Best of Franco Conner.

Did you choose him for the podcast because all of this work was so fresh in your mind or has he always been important to you?

He's always been important to me.

I actually edited an earlier collection for Penguin about 10 years ago.

I discovered him in a curious way.

I saw an old very old Penguin with the title, didn't look even look at the author's name.

I saw the title, My Eadepest Complex and other stories.

And I thought, that's wonderful because whoever wrote that title, My Eadepest Complex is a real writer.

A lesser writer would have written an Eadepest Complex or The Eadepest Complex.

But there's something about My which makes you want to grab that story and discover that child's story.

So from that moment I was hooked and I think he's still too undervalued.

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