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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 Evolution by Joan Silber,

which appeared in The New Yorker in September of 2022. I ran away with a boy when I was 16.

He was three years older, and I was enormously flattered that he wanted me to run off with him.

We didn't say we loved each other. We didn't bring that up, but my lust for him was great and constant.

The story was chosen by Sarah Swanen Bynum, who is the author of three books of fiction, including the novel

Ms. Hempel Chronicles, a Penn Faulkner award finalist, and the story collection Likes, which was

published in 2020.

Hi, Sarah.

Hi, Deborah.

So you chose to read a story by Joan Silber, who has published 10 books of fiction in the past 45 years or so.

Have you read a lot of her work and what makes it really stand out for you?

I love Joan Silver's work, which I first discovered in 2003 when I was reading the O'Henry Prize anthology, and she had a story in it called

The High Road, and it was this first-person voice that just leapt out and dazzled me. And I have

just been such an admirer of her work ever since then.

And each successive book has just been filled with these sharp, indelible voices telling their life stories.

And I get pleasure every time I dive into one of them.

What do you think makes her voice is so indelible in that way?

...