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 The Largesse of the Sea Maiden by Dennis Johnson,
which appeared in the New Yorker in March of 2014.
As soon as I touched the receiver, I wondered if I'd regret this,
if I was holding a mistake in my hand,
if I was pulling this mistake to my head and saying hello to it.
The story was chosen by Victor Lodato,
a playwright and fiction writer whose novels include Matilda Savage,
a winner of the Penn USA Award, and Honey, which was published last year.
Hi, Victor.
Hi, Deborah.
Welcome.
So you have chosen to read Dennis Johnson's story, The Largest of the Sea Maiden,
which came out in 2014, which was three years before Dennis died.
Did you read it back then?
Yeah, I read it in the magazine and then read it again when the...
his final collection of stories was published.
It's interesting because I tend to be drawn to Dennis Johnson's shorter works most,