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 Elephant by Raymond Carver,
which appeared in The New Yorker in June of 1986.
We talked a little more, mostly about our mother and her problems,
but to make a long story short, I sent him the money.
I had to.
I felt I had to at any rate, which amounts to the same thing.
The story was chosen by Miriam Taves, who is the author of ten books,
including the novels All My Puny Sorrows and Women Talking,
and the memoir A Truce That Is Not Peace.
Hi, Miriam.
Hi, Deborah.
So can you tell me what made you want to read a story by Raymond Carver today?
What has he meant to you as a reader and a writer?
Well, I haven't read a lot of his stuff recently,
but I read so many of his stories when I was young, you know, a teenager.
starting out first year university, and you know, I was a young parent.
I had kids when I was really young.