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 a story by Carson McCullers from 1941 called The Jockey.

It was Sylvester who first saw The Jockey.

He looked away quickly, put down his whiskey glass,

and nervously mashed the tip of his red nose with his thumb.

The Jockey was chosen by Karen Russell, two of whose stories have appeared in The New Yorker.

Her book of short stories, St. Lucie's Home for Girls Race by Wolves, came out in 2006.

Hi, Karen.

Hi, Deborah.

So Carson McCullers is often described as a Southern Gothic writer.

Now the story that you're reading is not said in the South and is not Gothic at all.

Do you think that that's a fair category to put her in?

I was just talking with a friend about how we're never sure what people mean exactly when they say Southern Gothic writer.

And then just our ideas about Gothic are like haunted castles,

which doesn't seem to conform anyway to the Kentucky Derby Southern climb.

So I think when people categorize her that way,

they're touching on the darkness inside her humor.

And I do think that you can feel that in this story.

The thing of that sort of twisted plenary O'Connor.

Yeah, I really feel there's a huge, I love Plenary O'Connor too.

...