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

I'm Deborah Treesman, Fiction Editor at the New Yorker.

Every month we ask a writer to choose a story from the magazine's archives to read and discuss.

On this program we'll hear a story by Tobias Wolff called Bullet in the Brain.

What do you tell us hits the alarm? You're all dead meat, got it?

The teller's nodded. Oh bravo, Anders said, dead meat.

The New Yorker first published Bullet in the Brain in 1995.

And it was selected this month by novelist TC Boyle, who has published 19 stories in the magazine since 1993.

His most recent novel, Talk Talk, came out last year.

He joins us from the studios of the production room in Santa Barbara, California.

Hi Tom.

Hi Deborah.

There are thousands of stories in the New Yorker archive, but you told me that it took you about 30 seconds to choose Bullet in the Brain.

It's one of your all-time favorites. Can you tell me why?

What I love about Bullet in the Brain is that it takes you into a space you couldn't imagine.

From the first line to what happens at the end is inconceivable.

Toby Wolff has written two novels, but he's better known for his memoirs, This Boy's Life, and in Pharaoh's Army.

And as a master of the short story form, he's often lumped together with other in veteran classical short story writers like Raymond Carver and Andre Dubus.

Do you think he belongs in that grouping?

Yes, I do. I think he is an individual, of course, with his own style.

He and Ray Carver taught together at Syracuse University, and I'm sure that there was a mutual influence there.

Ray Carver was a friend of mine. I met him at the Iowriter's workshop when I was a student there, and his work has influenced mine too.

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