This program was recorded shortly before the death of the writer Grace Paley, whose work it honors.

This is The New Yorker Out Loud from The New Yorker Magazine.

I'm Deborah Treesman, fiction editor at The New Yorker.

This month, we'll hear somewhere else, a story by Grace Paley, that was originally published in The New Yorker in 1978.

At any rate, he ignored Joe and the interesting socialist question of decentralized neighborhood industry.

Instead, he said, Mr. Lorenz, why did you choose to photograph that person?

What? Me? Me? Me?

Somewhere else was chosen from our archives by Nell Fordenberger, whose story Lucky Girls was published in the magazine in 2001.

A collection of her short stories with the same title was published in 2005.

Nell Fordenberger not only chose this month's story, she's here to talk about it too.

Hi, Nell. Hi.

Grace Paley published three books of short stories, and almost all of them are set in New York City, except for this one,

half of which takes place in China.

I know that you've written many times about Americans traveling abroad, and I wondered, is that what drew you to this story?

It was partly that, and I was really excited to see that one of my favorite writers was writing about a place that I've been.

But it was also just the circumstances of the trip that were really interesting to me.

I think that the trip that Grace Paley took was in 1974.

So she really, she did actually go to China at this point?

She did go, and she went in a group that was sponsored by the Guardian newspaper.

Her companions were mostly socialists, mostly writers and academics, including Barbara Ehrenreich.

So in 1974, the Cultural Revolution was still going on, Mao was still alive,

and the campaigns of the Cultural Revolution were still happening.

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