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 Noob Dean, electrician by Daniel Molina Dinn,

which was published in the New Yorker in August of 2007.

Unfortunately or fortunately, Noob had married early in life a sweet woman of unsurpassed fertility,

who he adored, and she proceeded to bear him children spaced if not less than nine months apart,

than not that much more.

The story was chosen by Marissa Silver, who's the author of two story collections in four novels,

including Mary Coine and Little Nothing. Hi Marissa.

Hi Deborah. So when we talked, you were on the podcast once before reading a story by Peter Taylor

and when we talked about doing it this time, this story, Noob Dean, electrician was one of the first

things that came to mind. Why was that? I just remember reading this in the New Yorker and at the time,

I think we had not been aware of this man as a writer. I just was knocked out by it and I think

what I love about this story and all of his stories is the deceptive simplicity of the telling,

which belies an incredible complexity underneath it. And it's the kind of story that I really admire.

And I think he does it so beautifully.

So you read it first just when it came out in the magazine?

Yeah and then I got the collection and read the collection in other rooms, other wonders.

Right. It's a stunning collection. It gets both the political and the personal

in such beautiful balance so that you understand both the kind of structural situation of this

landowner and his minions in Pakistan at that time and you also dig deeply into these

...