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 Pet Milk by Stuart Dybeck, which was published in The New Yorker in August of 1984.

The radio, turned low, played constantly.

Its top was warped in turning amber on the side where the tubes were.

I remember the sound of it on winter afternoons after school, as I sat by her table watching the Pet Milk's Whirl and Cloud in the steaming coffee.

The story was chosen by Kate Walbert, who's the author of six books of fiction, including The Novels, a short history of women, the Sunk and Cathedral, and his favorites, which comes out this month.

Hi Kate.

Hi Deborah.

So you chose a story by Stuart Dybeck to read today.

Has his writing been important to you in your own career or life?

Well, this story in particular has been important to me.

I remember I first read it in the Ohenry Prize Stories.

It was in the anthology in 1986.

And I was just struck by the fact that Dybeck had created a story out of what felt like a series of images as opposed to, you know, a complicated plot.

And that the power of the images and the resonance and the repetition led to a kind of music in the story.

It was so lyrical and poetic.

So it was a revelation to me that stories could be made this way.

It felt like a kind of perfectly constructed story.

And for me, because I was just getting out of graduate school and trying to write stories,

it gave me permission almost to write a story from an image.

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