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, on our 200th episode, we're going to hear

The Bees Part 1 by Alexander Hemon, which appeared in the New Yorker in October of 2002.

Father announced that he was going to make a film that would not lie.

My mother asked what the movie would be about. The truth, he said, obviously.

The story was chosen by Rivka Gautchen, whose books include the story collection American Innovations and the novel

Everyone Knows Your Mother is a Witch.

Hi Rifka, welcome back.

Hi, thanks for having me.

So on the other episodes of the podcast that you've done you chose stories by Isaac Bachev's

singer and Leonard Michaels and now Alexander Hemmon. And I'm wondering if there's a common denominator.

Yeah, no, I think one thing is that all of them have a language that feels translated.

I mean, Bachevise singer is translated, but when I say I say translated I mean it not in the sense of

awkwardness but in the sense of being very very precise like it feels foreign because it feels

so accurate each word choice feels accurate and that's something I'm drawn to I don't know why.

Yeah, it feels inflected.

I suppose you can hear it spoken with a certain, not accent but inflection yeah yeah and you with Leonard

Michaels you can kind of tell you grew up in a household that was using different

words and definitely that's also true of using different words. Mm-hmm.

And definitely, that's also true of Sasha Hammond and Isaac Singer.

...