Mary Lavin

Hi, Deborah.

So, uh, the last couple of times that you were on the Fiction Podcast, you chose stories by Sylvia Townsend Warner and Mary Lavin.

What made you go for Tobias Wolff this time?

Maybe it's the same thing, the idea that something very plain, um, something that doesn't, you know, have gorgeous writing in it or have any sort of obvious efforts towards transcendence, um-

Colm Tóibín, a winner of the International Dublin Literary Award, the Folio Prize, and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, among others, is a fiction writer, essayist, playwright, and poet.

He's published more than a dozen books of fiction, including the novels Brooklyn and The Magician, and the story collections The Empty Family and The News from Dublin.

You can download more than 230 previous episodes of The New Yorker Fiction Podcast, including episodes in which Colm Tóibín discusses work by Sylvia Townsend Warner and Mary Lavin, or subscribe to the podcast for free in Apple Podcasts.

On The Writer's Voice podcast, you can hear short stories from the magazine read by their authors.