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 New York Girl by John Uptike, which was published in The New Yorker in April of 1996.

I'm interested more in the flanges, I said, but she knew already that I was interested in her.

I had gone stupid. Something existed between us like a mist.

The story was chosen by Tessa Hadley, who's the author of nine books of fiction, including The Collections Married Love, and Bad Dreams and other stories, which was published last year.

Hi Tessa.

Hi Deborah.

So you came on the podcast a few years ago to read a story by Nadine Gordamer.

What made you choose John Uptike this time around?

It's funny. I hadn't thought of a connection between that Nadine Gordamer story and this, but I've just once popped into my head.

In a way, what contrasted story is in that the Gordamer is so dark, plie political.

And this is, if you like, an indulgent story, a story about surplus of pleasure in one sense.

But I remember Gordamer saying something somewhere about how nobody would ask John Uptike to write stories about politics or keep him to a political standard as they kept her.

So there's a minute fascinating.

I'm reaching these two things going on in the same world, two great writers, and one of them feeling that I am steely, frame pressing on her to be political and have the right answers.

Some lovely freedom that Uptike, to my mind, writes himself into in his work.

I'm a huge fan. I love his short stories. I think I love his short stories.

Just a bit better than I love his novels, actually. I, some of them I have been fascinated by, but there's something about the concentration of the short form with him that brings out all the things he's brilliant at.

So this story, New York girl, was published in 96. Uptike was in his mid 60s at that point. It's quite a late story for him, given that his career as a story writer started in his early 20s.

Do you think that it captures what he was best at?

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