This is the New Yorker fiction podcast from the New Yorker magazine. I'm Deborah

Treisman 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 two short pieces,

The Bible and the Stolen Pigeonsaree dures, which were translated from the French

by me and appeared in the New Yorker in December of 2006 and April of 2007.

The stories were chosen by Rachel Cusk who is the author of 12

novels including the Outline trilogy and Parade which will be published in June.

Hi Rachel, thank you for joining us.

Hi, Denver.

So when we first talked about doing this podcast, you were very interested in reading and talking

about something by a French writer.

Why was that? I completely upended my life

almost three years ago and moved from England to France and I think that that hasn't just been a complete sort of U-turn in kind of personal history and sort of social feeling of belonging but in terms of literature

and language it's been a fundamental change and actually being asked to make a choice from something, I suppose,

royal call of the kinds of writers that I would have naturally sort of

search for that very much belonged to that sort of discarded or defunct history seemed completely strange and

and so now I mostly read in French it felt much more natural to find something

French and Margaret Jorass has been very important writer for me in that

in that process. Yeah when we talked about your house she said that she had been a load

star for you in what way? Well I mean the way that I acquired the level of French that I needed to be able to live here was not from going and having language classes which I probably should have done but from reading and when I picked up Jorass I was really surprised to find that of all the

writers that I had attempted she was by far the easiest to comprehend her French was so

...