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 prizes by Janet Frame.

You cheated in history. You couldn't learn poetry by heart.

You never had your name in the paper. First in geometry French, English history.

The story was chosen by Miranda July, whose fiction and essays have been appearing in the New Yorker since 2006.

July is also a multimedia artist and a filmmaker.

Her most recent movie The Future came out in 2011.

And her first novel, The First Bad Man, will be published in 2015.

She joins us from a recording studio in Los Angeles.

Hi Miranda. Hi.

The first novel was published in the magazine in 1962 when Janet Frame was 38 and you did not exist.

So I'm wondering how you first came across Frame's work and what was the first piece of hers that you read?

Well like so many people, it was Jane Campian's movie, An Angel at my table about Janet Frame that led me to her work.

And I loved that movie. It was so important to me.

And then I guess I read Al's Do Cry, Faces in the Water.

I know I've had both those books for a long time.

They're a little impenetrable and I know I really like the titles.

And I often just sort of reread the titles.

But I really love also the story of her life.

And a lot of her work is very directly autobiographical, whether or not it's her autobiography.

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