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 Brian Friel, the saucer of Larks, which was published in the New Yorker in 1960.

Damn it, it's lovely, isn't it, huh? He said,

God himself above you and the best of creation all around you.

Do you know only that the Mrs. is buried away down in the Midlands?

I wouldn't mind being laid to rest anywhere along the coast here myself.

The story was chosen by Kevin Barry, whose second novel, Beatlebone, came out last year.

He's been publishing fiction in The New Yorker since 2010.

Hi, Kevin. Hello, Deborah. How you doing?

Welcome. Thank you.

So Brian Friel, who died last October, is best known as a playwright,

but before writing plays, he wrote two collections of short stories,

the handful of which appeared in The New Yorker.

How do you think he differed as a playwright and a short story writer?

You know, I've been reading through them again over the last few weeks,

and maybe it's with the benefit of hindsight, but I think in the stories you can see

very much a young playwright in Embryo. He's slightly constrained within the confines of the story

as a form, I think. His scenes are kind of very ritually organized.

He reminds me of someone else who would have been publishing, I guess, contemporaneously in The New York

or VS. Pritchett. As in the stories, they run on the engines of their talk and on their dialogue.

...