Why are you into it?
This is the one I'd text a friend about.
About
The New Yorker fiction podcast does something most literary adaptations don't. It makes you forget you're listening to someone else read. Deborah Treisman, the magazine's fiction editor since 2003, sits down with writers to discuss stories from the archives, then they read them aloud. The format sounds academic. It isn't.
Jennifer Egan reading Alice Munro. Junot Díaz on John Cheever. The conversations before each reading reveal how writers actually think about craft, not how they think they should talk about it in interviews. Treisman asks the right questions, the ones that make authors admit things. Why this story now. What they wish they'd written. Where they got stuck reading it the first time.
The readings themselves become something else entirely. These aren't audiobook performances. They're interpretations. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie reading James Baldwin changes how you hear Baldwin's rhythm. George Saunders on Donald Barthelme makes Barthelme's surrealism feel inevitable instead of precious. The archive becomes alive because it's filtered through living voices.
This is the text you send when someone says they don't have time to read short stories anymore. Twenty minutes in the car, on the train, washing dishes. Literature compressed into commute-sized doses without losing its voltage. The podcast has been running since 2007 and has never felt routine.
Fun fact
The podcast has featured writers reading stories by authors they've never met, creating literary conversations across decades and continents.