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 by Joyce Carol Oath's, called Mastiff.

The dog's damp, shining eyes were fixed on her, sharply focused.

With a kind of indignation quickly shifting to fury, it barked at the woman.

The story was chosen by Louise Erdrich, whose poems and stories have been appearing in the magazine since the late 1980s.

Her latest novel, The Roundhouse, came out in 2012 and won the National Book Award.

She joins me from a studio in Minnesota where she lives.

So welcome back, Louise.

Thank you, Debra. I'm happy to be here.

At the last time you were on the podcast was in 2008, and you read a story by Laurie Moore, called Dance in America.

Yes.

Mastiff is quite a different piece. Do you think that these two writers have anything in common?

I chose each one of those stories because I couldn't forget something about them.

They kept coming back to me.

And this one especially, it's stuck with me.

I kept thinking about the last scene, I kept thinking about the scene, the very centerpiece of the story,

and about the relationship of these two people.

Is Joyce's work been important to you over the years? Have you read her for a long time?

Yes, I have. I'm an admiring fan, and I know that the first thing people seem to ask her is,

how can a woman write with this amount of fervor, this sort of lured sort of writing it?

...