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 returns by Annie Erno,

which was translated from the French by me and appeared in the New Yorker in November of 2022.

I didn't take the taxi that was parked in front of the railway hotel,

as I would have anywhere else.

As soon as I'm in sea, I go back to my old ways.

The story was chosen by Lucinda Rosenfeld, who's the author of five novels,

including I'm so happy for you and class.

Hi, Lucinda.

Hi, Debra.

I see you.

You too.

So how and when did you become a reader of Annie Erno's work?

I actually started reading Annie Erno a year before she won the Nobel Prize.

A friend put me onto a girl's story.

Then I sort of started voraciously consuming all of it.

What made you devour it so voraciously?

There was something startling about the prose.

The language, I'm not the first remark, is incredibly direct and simple in a kind of shocking

way. I had never seen prose quite that declarative in literary form.

...