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 1 equals 1 by Ann Carson

which appeared in the New Yorker in January of 2016.

Every water has a right place to be, but that place is in motion.

You have to keep finding it.

Keep having it find you.

The story was chosen by Teju Cole, whose novels include Open City and Tremmer, which was published this year.

Hi Tiju.

Hello, Deborah.

And Carson is best known as a poet, a classicist, a translator.

Have you been a fan of her poetry and her translations as well?

Yes, I'm a big fan of her work and I think re-reading this story and thinking about it now

alerts me to not just the fact that she does interesting things

within the genres that she works in but that she's really dissolving genres.

So that to even think of myself as a fan of her poetry,

a fan of her translations, what I'm a fan of is what she does and there is a continuity in what she does so

this doesn't feel other to the body of her work even though it's it's published as

fiction it's that's right perhaps many things in one that's right as is

everything else that she does so I yeah count myself a fan. So there's continuity.

One equals one was the first piece of fiction by her that we ran in the magazine.

...