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 Elizabeth Taylor called The Letter

Riders. She stood before an alarming crisis.

The crisis of beating for the first time, the person whom she knew best in the world.

The story was chosen by Paul Theroux, whose fiction and journalism have been

appearing in the magazine since 1979. His latest book is The Last Train to

Zona Verde, my ultimate African safari. Welcome back to the podcast, Paul.

It's lovely to be here, Debra.

Now, the first time you appeared on this podcast, it was in 2007 and you read a

story by Borges. Oh, yeah, wonderful story. The gospel according to

mine. Yeah, and when we talked about doing another one, you came out with a

number of different writers to choose among Peter D'Vries, S.J.

Paralman, Joyce Carey, V.S. Pritchett, what made you decide on Elizabeth Taylor?

Elizabeth Taylor has an unfortunate name. People might think that it's the actress

and earlier incarnation. Elizabeth Taylor is a wonderful novelist and a

wonderful short story writer and greatly neglected. I chose her not only because

I feel that she's been neglected, but because the stories read so well, there's a

slightly dated quality to the syntax, but she was a woman who lived in Buckingham

shire outside London. I don't know much about her personally, but her stories show

that she did a little bit of traveling in Europe, New England very well, but knows

...