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 family man by V.S. Pritchett,

which was published in The New Yorker in November of 1977.

He's your wife. Beautiful. She had asked him once when they were in bed.

William, in his slow, serious way, took a long time to answer, he said, at last, very beautiful.

The story was chosen by Kevin Barry, a winner of the International Dublin Literary Award,

and the author of six books of fiction, including most recently the story collection that old country music,

which came out in 2020.

Hi, Kevin. Hello, Deborah. Thanks for joining.

You chose a story by V.S. Pritchett to read today, and I'm curious to know what your background with his work is.

You know, I kept away from his work for a long time on the basis of pure prejudice, actually,

because I think when I started to write stories myself in a serious way, in my mid-late 20s,

you know, I thought I'd better read some as well. And Pritchett, of course, gets mentioned as one of the

all-time greats of the craft. But there was something about his name, Sir Victor Sauten,

Pritchett. It was just two English, and I thought these are going to be perfect little cucumber sandwiches

of stories. You know, these are going to be so formally well done and so kind of polite and ironic

and knowing. And then I read Pritchett, and he is nothing like that. He's nuts. You know,

the first thing you grasp when you read the first paragraph of any Pritchett story is,

this guy is just off his beam in the most glorious, joyful way. And I very quickly became a huge

devotee of V.S.P. I'm always pushing him on friends and others, and I'm still waiting for the great

...