Souvankham Thammavongsa Reads Samanta Schweblin

Deborah Treisman· Host0:00

[intro 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 The Size of Things by Samanta Schweblin, translated from the Spanish by Megan McDowell, which appeared in The New Yorker in May of twenty seventeen.

Souvankham Thammavongsa· Guest0:28

In the display cases along the aisles on the shelves, a subtly shifting rainbow stretched from one end of the store to the other. I still remember that sight as the beginning of disaster.

Deborah Treisman· Host0:44

The story was chosen by Souvankham Thammavongsa, who is the author of four poetry collections and the short story collection How to Pronounce Knife, which was published in twenty twenty. Hi, Souvankham.

Souvankham Thammavongsa· Guest0:56

Hello, Deborah.

Deborah Treisman· Host0:58

So when we talked about doing this podcast, you brought up this story. You didn't remember the title of the story or who had written it, but you remembered the story itself very vividly, and I'm wondering what it was that you were remembering. Was it the way the story is written? Was it the details of the plot? Was it the approach to storytelling?

Souvankham Thammavongsa· Guest1:19

I don't remember why it stood out to me, just that it did. And the thing that I remember