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 The Necklace by V.S. Pritchett,

which appeared in the New Yorker in February of 1958.

It was my sister who started me using the word empty about Nell's gray eyes.

It was not the word I would have used myself,

but her eyes did make me feel I was going to fall clean through them.

The story was chosen by Paul Theroux,

whose almost 40 books of fiction include the novel Burma Sahib

and the story collection, The Vanishing Point, which came out in January.

Hi, Paul.

Hi, Deborah.

So in previous podcasts, you've read stories by Jorge Luis Borges and Elizabeth Taylor.

What made you decide to read V.S. Pritchett's story, The Necklace, today? I love this story, but also I could say, I knew Pritchett. When I lived in

London, he was a friend of mine. He's much older. Pritchett used to say, I'm as old as a century, so he's born in 1900.

So I first met him in 1973.

He was 73 years old.

He was still writing and still publishing.

He published his book about Chekhov in his late 80s.

The story is very him because it's about an English working man. And he chose a subject

that's been written about before, The Necklace. So Mo Passan wrote a short story called The

...