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 Miracle Polish by Stephen Melhouser,

which was published in the New Yorker in November of 2011.

If the polish had made me look younger, if it had made me handsome,

if it had smoothed my skin and fixed my teeth and changed the shape of my nose,

I'd have known it was some horrible mechanical trick.

The story was chosen by Stuart Dybeck, a poet and fiction writer,

whose story collections include Paper Lantern, Love Stories,

and Extatic Kahoot's 50 Short Stories.

Hi, Stuart.

Hi, Deborah.

So what is it that most draws you to Stephen Melhouser's work?

Well, I'm attracted to the kind of fabulous world that he creates.

I have a special fondness for writers working that dimension, a fiction,

but the other thing that I really love about his work is just the sure beauty of his writing.

He's got all the tools.

You mentioned to me that you had been teaching this story,

Miracle Polish, in a class on writing Fabulism.

Correct.

When I saw it in the New Yorker, I gobbled it up and put it in my hand.

...