This is the Fiction Podcast from the New Yorker magazine.

I'm Deborah Treesman, Fiction Editor at the New Yorker.

For our first podcast, we asked novelist and contributor

Richard Ford to choose a story from the New Yorker archives.

He chose a very short story by John Chiever called Reunion.

It was first published in the October 27th, 1962 issue

of the New Yorker.

We asked Richard why he chose this story.

It's such a perfect specimen of a short story,

in a sense, by being in my view, so economical

and yet has so much packed into itself

that I just loved it for that alone.

But also, what Chiever's story made clear to me

was that if you set something in the concourse

of Grand Central Station, you could plausibly

have anything happen any two people meet.

Not only did we ask Richard to choose a story,

he's also going to read it for us.

We'll talk about the story a little bit afterwards.

But first, let's hear Richard Ford,

Regan Chiever's short story, Reunion.

The last time I saw my father was in Grand Central Station.

...