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 we're going to hear Labyrinth by Roberto Bolano, translated

from the Spanish by Chris Andrews, which appeared in the New Yorker in January of

2012.

Who was J.J. Guoel waiting for, for someone he's in love with, someone he was hoping to sleep with that night?

And how was his delicate sensibility affected by that person's failure to show up?

The story was chosen by Sterling Holy White Mountain, a Jones lecturer at Stamford who grew up on the Blackfeet Reservation in Montana.

Hi, Sterling.

Hello Deborah.

Welcome, it's great to have you on the podcast. Yeah, this is, I'm excited to be here. This is cool.

You have chosen to read and talk about a story by the late Chilean writer Roberto Bolano.

What made you think of him for this?

Well, I, you know, I originally thought maybe I would do an Updyke story and then I saw the list of up dyke stories and I thought we should get the

podcast done before 2027. I love Belagno and I stumbled across this story maybe two years ago and I fell in love with it and I think it's just a really interesting story in so many different ways.

And how did you first read Balano?

How did you come across him?

I was in the workshop in Iowa, I believe, when 2666 came out. I didn't read it then though. Basically what

happened to me is what happens to a lot of people when they get out of MFA

programs, which is that you get out of there and you've

completely forgotten why it is that you ever read or wrote anything in the first

...