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 a story by Leonard Michaels that was published just after his death in 2003.

It's called cryptology.

Did Notman want those memories?

The Notman he no longer remembered was certainly himself.

After all, who else could it be?

The story was chosen by Rivka Galchen, the author of the novel atmospheric disturbances.

Her second story for the New Yorker appears in the new summer fiction issue, which features our top 20 fiction writers under the age of 40.

Hi Rivka.

Hi.

So tell me how did you first come across cryptology?

Had you been reading Lenny Michaels?

I actually hadn't been reading Lenny Michaels and didn't even know who he was, even though he had been like a huge figure.

It was when I was a little too young and a little too clueless.

And then the writer Rebecca Curtis suggested I read it as a kind of solution to something else that I was thinking through.

And then I fell in love with all the Nockman stories.

Nockman, who's the hero of this story, is also the hero of I think seven other stories that Michaels wrote.

Sort of in the last six, seven years of his life.

What was it about the story that grabbed you so much?

I think this sense of avoiding recognition.

...