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 the penultimate conjecture by Leonard Michaels.

He should have taken the risk.

He should have been more like linguist, more manly.

Enough knock-man, said knock-man to himself.

The story was chosen by Rebecca Curtis, whose fiction has been appearing in the New Yorker since 2001.

Her collection of stories, 20 grand and other tales of love and money, came out in 2007.

Hi, Rebecca.

Hi.

The Leonard Michaels died in 2003, which was four years after this story was published.

Were you reading his work back then?

I think the first time I read his story was probably in an anthology, actually in the best American.

I think I read Girl with a Monkey and was very struck by it.

It's such a sexy story, but also very dark and very taught and condensed.

Also, murderers, George Saunders taught us murderers in the MFA program I was at in Syracuse.

What was it about his style that drew you in?

I think like Isaac Babel, he has a way of punching dramatic impact into very short sentences

and having very quick 90 degree turns in meaning and tone and emotion within a very short sentence.

The story that you're going to read, the penultimate conjecture, is about a mathematician called Raphael Nockman.

It's one in a series of seven stories that Michael's wrote in the last six years of his life, which are all about Nockman.

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