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The New Yorker: Fiction

Jennifer Egan Reads Margaret Atwood

1/1/20251 hr 7 min

Jennifer Egan joins Deborah Treisman to read and discuss “Kat,” by Margaret Atwood, which was published in The New Yorker in 1990. Egan’s books of fiction include “The Keep,” “A Visit from the Goon Squad,” “Manhattan Beach,” and “The Candy House.” She is a winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Pulitzer Prize, and the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, among other honors. She has been publishing fiction and nonfiction in The New Yorker since 1989.

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Clips

Who Really Holds Power
Nothing Sells Like Anxiety
A Retro Yearning Revealed
The Hairball As Payback
Begin From The Inside Out
Queen Of Edgy Meets A Wall
Savaging The Inner Whinge
When Fashion Normalized Harm

Transcript preview

First 90 seconds

  1. Deborah Treisman· Host0:00

    [upbeat music] 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 Cat by Margaret Atwood, which appeared in The New Yorker in March of 1990. The story was chosen by Jennifer Egan, who's published seven books of fiction, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning A Visit from the Goon Squad, and most recently, The Candy House. Hi, Jenny.

  2. Jennifer Egan· Guest0:34

    Hi, Deborah.

  3. Deborah Treisman· Host0:35

    So on past episodes of the Fiction Podcast, you read stories by Lori Siegel and Mary Gaitskill, and today you chose Margaret Atwood. Why was that?

  4. Jennifer Egan· Guest0:46

    Well, I like picking stories that I actually haven't looked at in a really long time but have stayed with me in some way, and I actually hadn't read Cat since the '90s. So, um, I think part of it was just a wish to revisit it, and then once I did, in some ways it's really a story about a changing era, and yet its own era now feels way in the distance for all kinds of reasons. So as a cultural and personal artifact, it felt really fascinating to me.

  5. Deborah Treisman· Host1:17

    Yeah, so it came out in 1990, and I think you had published your first story in the magazine the year before that. So you were aware of The New Yorker.

  6. Jennifer Egan· Guest1:27

    [laughs] Oh, yes.

  7. Deborah Treisman· Host1:28

    [laughs] Did, did you read

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