This is the New Yorker Fiction Podcast from the New Yorker magazine.

I'm Deborah 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 concerning the Bodyguard by Donald Bartholomey,

which was published in the magazine in 1978.

Those young men with dark liars, staring at the Mercedes, or staring at the Citroen.

Who are they?

The story was chosen by Salman Rushdie, whose fiction and essays have been appearing in the magazine since 1987.

His latest book is Luca and the Fire of Life.

Hi, Salman.

Hi.

So you are the third person in maybe 50 podcasts that we've done to immediately ask to read a Donald Bartholomey story.

Why do you think that is?

There's nobody else like him is, why it is.

And in a strange way, no two of his stories are like each other.

So I'm not surprised, really, because I certainly, when I was a young writer reading the magazine,

the stories of Bartholomey were the things that really leapt out.

Not always successfully, sometimes they were just so weird that you couldn't go along with them,

but very often they were kind of mind-blowing because they were so odd.

And because his way of telling a story was so bleak and so indirect that you had to really, really pay attention

just to find out what was going on, and they're funny too.

Do you think he had a real influence on a certain generation of writers?

...